He knew that his Lens would receive and would convert into his own symbology any thought or message, however coded or garbled or however sent or transmitted. The Lens was not at fault; his symbology was. There were concepts—things—actualities—occurrences—so foreign to Tellurian experience that no referents existed. Hence the human mind lacked the channels, the mechanisms; to grasp them.
He and Roderick Kinnison had glibly discussed the possibility of encountering forms of intelligent life so alien that humanity would have no point whatever of contact with them. After what Samms had just gone through, that was more of a possibility than either he or his friend had believed; and he hoped grimly, as he considered how seriously this partial contact with the Palainian had upset him, that the possibility would never become a fact.
He found the Palainian system easily enough, and Palain Seven. That planet, of course, was almost as dark upon its sunward side as upon the other, and its inhabitants had no use for light. Pilinipsi’s instructions, however, had been minute and exact; hence Samms had very little trouble in locating the principal city—or, rather, the principal village, since there were no real cities. He found the planet’s one spaceport. What a thing to call a port! He checked back; recalled exactly this part of his interview with Pluto’s Chief Dexitroboper.
“The place upon which space-ships land,” had been her thought, when she showed him exactly where it was in relationship to the town. Just that, and nothing else. It had been his mind, not hers, that had supplied the docks and cradles, the service cars, the officers, and all the other things taken for granted in space-fields everywhere as Samms knew them. Either the Palainian had not perceived the trappings with which Samms had invested her visualization, or she had not cared enough about his misapprehension to go to the trouble of correcting it; he did not know which.
The whole area was as bare as his hand. Except for the pitted, scarred, slagged-down spots which showed so clearly what driving blasts would do to such inconceivably cold rock and metal, Palainport was in no way distinguishable from any other unimproved portion of the planet’s utterly bleak surface.
There were no signals; he had been told of no landing conventions. Apparently it was everyone for himself. Wherefore Samms’ tremendous landing lights blazed out, and with their aid he came safely to ground. He put on his armor and strode to the airlock; then changed his mind and went to the cargo-port instead. He had intended to walk, but in view of the rugged and deserted field and the completely unknown terrain between the field and the town, he decided to ride the “creep” instead.
This vehicle, while slow, could go—literally—anywhere. It had a cigar-shaped body of magnalloy; it had big, soft, tough tires; it had cleated tracks; it had air- and water-propellers; it had folding wings; it had driving, braking, and steering jets. It could traverse the deserts of Mars, the oceans and swamps of Venus, the crevassed glaciers of Earth, the jagged, frigid surface of an iron asteroid, and the cratered, fluffy topography of the moon; if not with equal speed, at least with equal safety.
Samms released the thing and drove it into the cargo lock, noting mentally that he would have to exhaust the air of that lock into space before he again broke the inner seal. The ramp slid back into the ship; the cargo port closed. Here he was!
Should he use his headlights, or not? He did not know the Palainians’ reaction to or attitude toward light. It had not occurred to him while at Pluto to ask, and it might be important. The landing lights of his vessel might already have done his cause irreparable harm. He could drive by starlight if he had to…but he needed light and he had not seen a single living or moving thing. There was no evidence that there was a Palainian within miles. While he had known, with his brain, that Palain would be dark, he had expected to find buildings and traffic—ground-cars, planes, and at least a few space-ships—and not this vast nothingness.
If nothing else, there must be a road from Palain’s principal city to its only spaceport; but Samms had not seen it from his vessel and he could not see it now. At least, he could not recognize it. Wherefore he clutched in the tractor drive and took off in a straight line toward town. The going was more than rough—it was really rugged—but the creep was built to stand up under punishment and its pilot’s chair was sprung and cushioned to exactly the same degree. Hence, while the course itself was infinitely worse than the smoothly paved approaches to Rigelston, Samms found this trip much less bruising than the other had been.
Approaching the village, he dimmed his roadlights and slowed down. At its edge he cut them entirely and inched his way forward by starlight alone.
What a town! Virgil Samms had seen the inhabited places of almost every planet of Civilization. He had seen cities laid out in circles, sectors, ellipses, triangles, squares, parallelopipeds—practically every plan known to geometry. He had seen structures of all shapes and sizes—narrow skyscrapers, vast-spreading one-stories, polyhedra, domes, spheres, semi-cylinders, and erect and inverted full and truncated cones and pyramids. Whatever the plan or the shapes of the component units, however, those inhabited places had, without exception, been understandable. But this!
Samms, his eyes now completely dark-accustomed, could see fairly well, but the more he saw the less he grasped. There was no plan, no coherence or unity whatever. It was as though a cosmic hand had flung a few hundreds of buildings, of incredibly and senselessly varied shapes and sites and architectures, upon an otherwise empty plain, and as though each structure had been allowed ever since to remain in whatever location and attitude it had chanced to fall. Here and there were jumbled piles of three or more utterly incongruous structures. There were a few whose arrangement was almost orderly. Here and there were large, irregularly-shaped areas of bare, untouched ground. There were no streets—at least, nothing that the man could recognize as such.
Samms headed the creep for one of those open areas, then stopped—declutched the tracks, set the brakes, and killed the engines.
“Go slow, fellow,” he advised himself then. “Until you find out what a dexitroboper actually does while working at his trade, don’t take chances of interfering or of doing damage!”
No Lensman knew—then—that frigid-blooded poison-breathers were not strictly three-dimensional; but Samms did know that he had actually seen things which he could not understand. He and Kinnison had discussed such occurrences calmly enough; but the actuality was enough to shake even the mind of Civilization’s First Lensman.
He did not need to be any closer, anyway. He had learned the Palainians’ patterns well enough to Lens them from a vastly greater distance than his present one; this personal visit to Palainopolis had been a gesture of friendliness, not a necessity.
“Tallick? Kragzex?” He sent out the questing, querying thought. “Lensman Virgil Samms of Sol Three calling Tallick and Kragzex of Palain Seven.”
“Kragzex acknowledging, Virgil Samms,” a thought snapped back, as diamond-clear, as precise, as Pilinipsi’s had been.
“Is Tallick here, or anywhere on the planet?”
“He is here, but he is emmfozing at the moment. He will join us presently.”
Damnation! There it was again! First “dexitroboping”, and now this!
“One moment, please,” Samms requested. “I fail to grasp the meaning of your thought.”
“So I perceive. The fault is of course mine, in not being able to attune my mind fully to yours. Do not take this, please, as any aspersion upon the character or strength of your own mind.”
“Of course not. I am the first Tellurian you have met?”
“Yes.”
“I have exchanged thoughts with one other Palainian, and the same difficulty existed. I can neither understand nor explain it; but it is as though there are differences between us so fundamental that in some matters mutual comprehension is in fact impossible.”
“A masterly summation and undoubtedly a true one. This emmfozing, then—if I read correctly, your race has only two sexes?”
“You read
correctly.”
“I cannot understand. There is no close analogy. However, emmfozing has to do with reproduction.”
“I see,” and Samms saw, not only a frankness brand-new to his experience, but also a new view of both the powers and the limitations of his Lens.
It was, by its very nature, of precisionist grade. It received thoughts and translated them precisely into English. There was some leeway, but not much. If any thought was such that there was no extremely close counterpart or referent in English, the Lens would not translate it at all, but would simply give it a hitherto meaningless symbol—a symbol which would from that time on be associated, by all Lenses everywhere, with that one concept and no other. Samms realized then that he might, some day, learn what a dexitroboper actually did and what the act of emmfozing actually was; but that he very probably would not.
Tallick joined them then, and Samms again described glowingly, as he had done so many times before, the Galactic Patrol of his imaginings and plannings. Kragzex refused to have anything to do with such a thing, almost as abruptly as Pilinipsi had done, but Tallick lingered—and wavered.
“It is widely known that I am not entirely sane,” he admitted, “which may explain the fact that I would very much like to have a Lens. But I gather, from what you have said, that I would probably not be given a Lens to use purely for my own selfish purposes?”
“That is my understanding,”. Samms agreed.
“I was afraid so.” Tallick’s mien was…“woebegone” is the only word for it. “I have work to do. Projects, you know, of difficulty, of extreme complexity and scope, sometimes even approaching danger. A Lens would be of tremendous use.”
“How?” Samms asked. “If your work is of enough importance to enough people, Mentor would certainly give you a Lens.”
“his would benefit me; only me. We of Palain, as you probably already know, are selfish, mean-spirited, small-souled, cowardly, furtive, and sly. Of what you call ‘bravery’ we have no trace. We attain our ends by stealth, by indirection, by trickery and deceit.” Ruthlessly the Lens was giving Virgil Samms the uncompromisingly exact English equivalent of the Palainian’s every thought. “We operate, when we must operate at all openly, with the absolutely irreducible minimum of personal risk. These attitudes will, I have no doubt, preclude all possibility of Lensmanship for me and for every member of my race.”
“Not necessarily.”
Not necessarily! Although Virgil Samms did not know it, this was one of the really critical moments in the coming into being of the Galactic Patrol. By a conscious, a tremendous effort, the First Lensman was lifting himself above the narrow, intolerant prejudices of human experience and was consciously attempting to see the whole through Mentor’s Arisian mind instead of through his Tellurian own. That Virgil Samms was the first human being to be born with the ability to accomplish that feat even partially was one of the reasons why he was the first wearer of the Lens.
“Not necessarily,” First Lensman Virgil Samms said and meant. He was inexpressibly shocked—revolted in every human fiber—by what this unhuman monster had so frankly and callously thought. There were, however, many things which no human being ever could understand, and there was not the shadow of a doubt that this Tallick had a really tremendous mind. “You have said that your mind is feeble. If so, there is no simple expression of the weakness of mine. I can perceive only one, the strictly human, facet of the truth. In a broader view it is distinctly possible that your motivation is at least as ‘noble’ as mine. And to complete my argument, you work with other Palainians, do you not, to reach a common goal?”
“At times, yes.”
“Then you can conceive of the desirability of working with non-Palainian entities toward an end which would benefit both races?”
“Postulating such an end, yes; but I am unable to visualize any such. Have you any specific project in mind?”
“Not at the moment.” Samms ducked. He had already fired every shot in his locker. “I am quite certain, however, that if you go to Arisia you will be informed of several such projects.”
There was a period of silence. Then:
“I believe that I will go to Arisia, at that!” Tallick exclaimed, brightly. “I will make a deal with your friend Mentor. I will give him a share—say fifty percent, or forty—of the time and effort I save on my own projects!”
“Just so you go, Tallick.” Samms concealed right manfully his real opinion of the Palainian’s scheme. “When can you go? Right now?”
“By no means. I must first finish this project. A year, perhaps—or more; or possibly less. Who knows?”
Tallick cut communications and Samms frowned. He did not know the exact length of Seven’s year, but he knew that it was long—very long.
CHAPTER
11
Zabriskan Fontema
SMALL, BLACK SCOUT-SHIP , commanded jointly by Master Pilot John K. Kinnison and Master Electronicist Mason M. Northrop, was blasting along a course very close indeed to RA17: D+10. In equipment and personnel, however, she was not an ordinary scout. Her control room was so full of electronics racks and computing machines that there was scarcely footway in any direction; her graduated circles and vernier scales were of a size and a fineness usually seen only in the great vessels of the Galactic Survey. And her crew, instead of the usual twenty-odd men, numbered only seven—one cook, three engineers, and three watch officers. For some time the young Third Officer, then at the board, had been studying something on his plate; comparing it minutely with the chart clipped into the rack in front of him. Now he turned, with a highly exaggerated deference, to the two Lensmen.
“Sirs, which of your Magnificences is officially the commander of this here bucket of odds and ends at the present instant?”
“Him.” Jack used his cigarette as a pointer. “The guy with the misplaced plucked eyebrow on his upper lip. I don’t come on duty until sixteen hundred hours—one precious Tellurian minute yet in which to dream of the beauties of Earth so distant in space and in both past and future time.”
“Huh? Beauties? Plural? Next time I see a party whose pictures are cluttering up this whole ship I’ll tell her about your polygamous ideas. I’ll ignore that crack about my mustache, though, since you can’t raise one of your own. I’m ignoring you, too—like this, see?” Ostentatiously turning his back upon the lounging Kinnison, Northrop stepped carefully over three or four breadboard hookups and stared into the plate over the watch officer’s shoulder. He then studied the chart. “Was ist los, Stu? I don’t see a thing.”
“More Jack’s line than yours, Mase. This system we’re headed for is a triple, and the chart says it’s a double. Natural enough, of course. This whole region is unexplored, so the charts are astronomicals, not surveys. But that makes us Prime Discoverers, and our Commanding Officer—and the book says ‘Officer’, not ‘Officers’—has got to…”
“That’s me, now,” Jack announced, striding grandly toward the plate. “Amscray, oobsbay. I will name the baby. I will report. I will go down in history…”
“Bounce back, small fry. You weren’t at the time of discovery.” Northrop placed a huge hand flat against Jack’s face and pushed gently. “You’ll go down, sure enough—not in history, but from a knock on the knob—if you try to steal any thunder away from me. And besides, you’d name it ‘Dimples’—what a revolting thought!”
“And what would you name it? ‘Virgilia’, I suppose?”
“Far from it, my boy.” He had intended doing just that, but now he did not quite dare. “After our project, of course. The planet we’re heading for will be Zabriska; the suns will be A-, B-, and C-Zabriskae, in order of size; and the watch officer then on duty, Lieutenant L. Stuart Rawlings, will engross these and all other pertinent data in the log. Can you classify ’em from here, Jack?”
“I can make some guesses—close enough, probably, for Discovery work.” Then, after a few minutes: “Two giants, a blue-white and a bluish yellow; and a yellow dwarf.”
/>
“Dwarf in the Trojan?”
“That would be my guess, since that is the only place it could stay very long, but you can’t tell much from one look. I can tell you one thing, though—unless your Zabriska is in a system straight beyond this one, it’s got to be a planet of the big fellow himself; and brother, that sun is hot!”
“It’s got to be here, lack. I haven’t made that big an error in reading a beam since I was a sophomore.”
“I’ll buy that…well, we’re close enough, I guess.” Jack killed the driving blasts, but not the Bergenholm; the inertialess vessel stopped instantaneously in open space. “Now we’ve got to find out which one of those twelve or fifteen planets was on our line when that last message was sent… There, we’re stable enough, I hope. Open your cameras, Mase. Pull the first plate in fifteen minutes. That ought to give me enough track so I can start the job, since we’re at a wide angle to their ecliptic.”
The work went on for an hour or so. Then:
“Something coming from the direction of Tellus,” the watch officer reported. “Big and fast. Shall I hail her?”
“Might as well,” but the stranger hailed first.
“Space-ship Chicago, NA2AA, calling. Are you in trouble? Identify yourself, please.”
“Space-ship NA774J acknowledging. No trouble…”
“Northrop! Jack!” came Virgil Samms’ highly concerned thought. The superdreadnaught flashed alongside, a bare few hundred miles away, and stopped. “Why did you stop here?”
“This is where our signal came from, sir.”
“Oh.” A hundred thoughts raced through Samms’ mind, too fast and too fragmentary to be intelligible. “I see you’re computing. Would it throw you off too much to go inert and match intrinsics, so that I can join you?”
“No sir; I’ve got everything I need for a while.”
Samms came aboard; three Lensmen studied the chart.
First Lensman Page 16