Galactic Patrol

by Edward E Smith

“Of course he is. You don’t seem to realize, you myopic old appendix-snatcher, that he’s pure Kinnison!”

  “Ah…so maybe we could…but he won’t be falling for anybody yet, since he’s just been unattached. He’ll be bullet-proof for quite a while. You ought to know that young Lensmen—especially young Gray Lensmen—can’t see anything but their jobs; for a couple of years, anyway.”

  “His skeleton tells you that, too, huh?” Haynes grunted, skeptically. “Ordinarily, yes; but you never can tell, especially in hospitals…”

  “More of your layman’s misinformation!” Lacy snapped. “Contrary to popular belief, romance does not thrive in hospitals; except, of course, among the staff. Patients often-times think that they fall in love with nurses, but it takes two people to make one romance. Nurses do not fall in love with patients, because a man is never at his best under hospitalization. In fact, the better a man is, the poorer a showing he is apt to make.”

  “And, as I forget who said, a long time ago, ‘no generalization is true, not even this one’,” retorted the Port Admiral. “When it does hit him it will hit hard, and we’ll take no chances. How about the black-haired one?”

  “Well, I just told you that MacDougall has the only perfect skeleton I ever saw in a woman. Brownies is very good, too, of course, but…”

  “But not good enough to rate Lensman’s Mate, eh?” Haynes completed the thought. “Then take her out. Pick the best skeletons you’ve got for this job, and see that no others come anywhere near him. Transfer them to some other hospital—to some other floor of this one, at least. Any woman that he ever falls for will fall for him, in spite of your ideas as to the one-wayness of hospital romance; and I don’t want him to have such a good chance of making a dive at something that doesn’t rate up. Am I right or wrong, and for how much?”

  “Well, I haven’t had time yet to really study his skeleton, but…”

  “Better take a week off and study it. I’ve studied a lot of people in the last sixty-five years, and I’ll match my experience against your knowledge of bones, any time. Not saying that he will fall this trip, you understand—just playing safe.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  Advanced Training

  INNISON CAME TO—or, rather, to say that he came half-to would be a more accurate statement—with a yell directed at the blurrily-seen figure in white which he knew must be a nurse.

  “Nurse!” Then, as a searing stab of pain shot through him at the effort, he went on, thinking at the figure in white through his Lens:

  “My speedster! I must have landed her free! Get the space-port…”

  “There, there, Lensman,” a low, rich voice crooned, and a red head bent over him. “The speedster has been taken care of. Everything is on the green; go to sleep and rest.”

  “But my ship…”

  “Never mind your ship,” the unctuous voice went on. “It was landed and put away…”

  “Listen, dumb-bell!” snapped the patient, speaking aloud now, in spite of the pain, the better to drive home his meaning. “Don’t try to soothe me! What do you think I am, delirious? Get this and get it straight I said I landed that speedster free. If you don’t know what that means, tell somebody that does. Get the space-port—get Haynes—get…”

  “We got them, Lensman, long ago.” Although her voice was still creamily, sweetly sofa, an angry color burned into the nurse’s face. “I said everything is on zero. Your speedster was inserted; how else could you be here, inert? I helped do it myself, so I know she’s inert”

  “QX.” The patient relapsed instantly into unconsciousness and the nurse turned to an interne standing by—wherever that nurse was, at least one doctor could almost always be found.

  “Dumb-bell!” she flared. “What a sweet mess he’s going to be to take care of! Not even conscious yet, and he’s calling names and picking fights already!”

  In a few days Kinnison was fully and alertly conscious. In a week most of the pain had left him, and he was beginning to chafe under restraint. In ten days he was “fit to be tied,” and his acquaintance with his head nurse, so inauspiciously begun, developed even more inauspiciously as time went on. For, as Haynes and Lacy had each more than anticipated, the Lensman was by no means an ideal patient.

  Nothing that could be done would satisfy him. All doctors were fat-heads, even Lacy, the man who had put him together. All nurses were dumb-bells, even—or especially?—“Mac,” who with almost superhuman skill, tact, and patience had been holding him together. Why, even fat-heads and dumb-bells, even high-grade morons, ought to know that a man needed food!

  Accustomed to eating everything he could reach, three or four or five times a day, he did not realize—nor did his stomach—that his now quiescent body could no longer use the five thousand or more calories that it had been wont to burn up, each twenty-four hours, in intense effort. He was always hungry, and he was forever demanding food.

  And food, to him, did not mean orange juice or grape juice or tomato juice or milk. Nor did it mean weak tea and hard, dry toast and an occasional anemic soft-boiled egg. If he ate eggs at all he wanted them fried; three or four of them, accompanied by two or three thick slices of ham.

  He wanted—and demanded in no uncertain terms, argumentatively and persistently—a big, thick, rare beefsteak. He wanted baked beans, with plenty of fat pork. He wanted bread in thick slices, piled high with butter, and not this quadruply-and-unmentionably-qualified toast. He wanted roast beef, rare, in big, thick slabs. He wanted potatoes and thick brown gravy. He wanted corned beef and cabbage. He wanted pie—any kind of pie—in large, thick quarters. He wanted peas and corn and asparagus and cucumbers, and also various other-worldly staples of diet which he often and insistently mentioned by name.

  But above all he wanted beefsteak. He thought about it days and dreamed about it nights. One night in particular he dreamed about it—an especially luscious porterhouse, fried in butter and smothered in mushrooms—only to wake up, mouth watering, literally starved, to face again the weak tea, dry toast, and, horror of horrors, this time a flabby, pallid, flaccid poached egg! It was the last straw.

  “Take it away,” he said, weakly; then, when the nurse did not obey, he reached out and pushed the breakfast, tray and all, off the table. Then, as it crashed to the floor, he turned away, and, in spite of all his efforts, two hot tears forced themselves between his eyelids.

  It was a particularly trying ordeal, and one requiring all of even Mac’s skill, diplomacy, and forbearance, to make the recalcitrant patient eat the breakfast prescribed for him. She was finally successful, however, and as she stepped out into the corridor she met the ubiquitous interne.

  “How’s your Lensman?” he asked, in the privacy of the diet kitchen.

  “Don’t call him my Lensman!” she stormed. She was about to explode with the pent-up feelings which she of course could not vent upon such a pitiful, helpless thing as her star patient. “Beefsteak! I almost wish they would give him a beefsteak, and that he’d choke on it—which of course he would. He’s worse than a baby. I never saw such a…such a brat in my life. I’d like to spank him—he needs it. I’d like to know how he ever got to be a Lensman, the big cantankerous clunker! I’m going to spank him, too, one of these days, see if I don’t!”

  “Don’t take it so hard, Mac,” the interne urged. He was, however, very much relieved that relations between the handsome young Lensman and the gorgeous red-head were not upon a more cordial basis. “He won’t be here very long. But I never saw a patient clog your jets before.”

  “You probably never saw a patient like him before, either. I certainly hope he never gets cracked up again.”

  “Huh?”

  “Do I have to draw you a chart?” she asked, sweetly. “Or, if he does get cracked up again, I hope they send him to some other hospital,” and she flounced out.

  Nurse MacDougall thought that when the Lensman could eat the meat he craved her troubles would be over, but she was mistaken. Kinnison w
as nervous, moody, brooding; by turns irritable, sullen, and pugnacious. Nor is it to be wondered at. He was chained to that bed, and in his mind was the gnawing consciousness that he had failed. And not only failed—he had made a complete fool of himself. He had underestimated an enemy, and as a result of his own stupidity the whole Patrol had taken a setback. He was anguished and tormented. Therefore:

  “Listen, Mac,” he pleaded one day. “Bring me some clothes and let me take a walk. I need exercise.”

  “Uh uh, Kim, not yet,” she denied him gently, but with her entrancing smile in full evidence. “But pretty quick, when that leg looks a little less like a Chinese puzzle, you and nursie go bye-bye.”

  “Beautiful, but dumb!” the Lensman growled. “Can’t you and those cockeyed croakers realize that I’ll never get any strength back if you keep me in bed all the rest of my life? And don’t talk baby-talk at me, either. I’m well enough at least so you can wipe that professional smile off your pan and cut that soothing bedside manner of yours.”

  “Very well—I think so, too!” she snapped, patience at long last gone. “Somebody should tell you the truth. I always supposed that Lensmen had to have brains, but you’ve been a perfect brat ever since you’ve been here. First you wanted to eat yourself sick, and now you want to get up, with bones half-knit and burns half-healed, and undo everything that has been done for you. Why don’t you snap out of it and act your age for a change?”

  “I never did think nurses had much sense, and now I know they haven’t.” Kinnison eyed her with intense disfavor, not at all convinced. “I’m not talking about going back to work. I mean a little gentle exercise, and I know what I need.”

  “You’d be surprised at what you don’t know,” and the nurse walked out, chin in air. In five minutes, however, she was back, her radiant smile again flashing.

  “Sorry, Kim, I shouldn’t have blasted off that way—I know that you’re bound to back-fire and to have brainstorms. I would, too, if I were…”

  “Cancel it, Mac,” he began, awkwardly. “I don’t know why I have to be crabbing at you all the time.”

  “QX, Lensman,” she replied, entirely serene now. “I do. You’re not the type to stay in bed without it griping you; but when a man has been ground up into such hamburger as you are, he has to stay in bed whether he likes it or not, and no matter how much he pops off about it. Roll over here, now, and I’ll glue you an alcohol rub. But it won’t be long now, really—pretty soon we’ll have you out in a wheel-chair…”

  Thus it went for weeks. Kinnison knew his behavior was atrocious, abominable; but he simply could not help it. Every so often the accumulated pressure of his bitterness and anxiety would blow off; and, like a jungle tiger with a toothache, he would bite and claw anything or anybody within reach.

  Finally, however, the last picture was studied, the last bandage removed, and he was discharged as fit. And he was not discharged, bitterly although he resented his “captivity,” se he called it, until he really was fit. Haynes saw to that. And Haynes had allowed only the most sketchy interviews during that long convalescence. Discharged, however, Kinnison sought him out.

  “Let me talk first,” Haynes instructed him at sight. “No self-reproaches, no destructive criticism. Everything constructive. Now, Kimball, I’m mighty glad to hear that you made a perfect recovery. You were in bad shape. Go ahead.”

  “You have just about shut my mouth by your first order.” Kinnison smiled sourly as he spoke. “Two words—flat failure. No, let me add two more—as yet.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Haynes exclaimed. “Nor do we agree with you that it was a failure. It was merely not a success—so far—which is an altogether different thing. Also, I may add that we had very fine reports indeed on you from the hospital.”

  “Huh?” Kinnison was amazed to the point of being inarticulate.

  “You just about tore it down, of course, but that was only to be expected.”

  “But, sir, I made such a…”

  “Exactly. As Lacy tells me quite frequently, he likes to have patients over there that they don’t like. Mull that one over for a bit—you may understand it better as you get older. The thought, however, may take some of the load off your mind.”

  “Well, sir, I am feeling a trifle low, but if you and the rest of them still think…”

  “We do so think. Cheer up and get on with the story.”

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and before I go around sticking out my neck again I’m going to…”

  “You don’t need to tell me, you know.”

  “No, sir, but I think I’d better. I’m going to Arisia to see if I can get me a few treatments for swell-head and lame-brain. I still think that I know how to use the Lens to good advantage, but I simply haven’t got enough jets to do it. You see, I…” he stopped. He would not offer anything that might sound like an alibi: but his thoughts were plain as print to the old Lensman.

  “Go ahead, son. We know you wouldn’t.”

  “If I thought at all, I assumed that I was tackling men, since those on the ship were men, and men were the only known inhabitants of the Aldebaranian system. But when those wheelers took me so easily and so completely, it became very evident that I didn’t have enough stuff. I ran like a scared pup, and I was lucky to get home at all. It wouldn’t have happened if…” he paused.

  “If what? Reason it out, son,” Haynes advised, pointedly. “You are wrong, dead wrong. You made no mistake, either in judgment or in execution. You have been blaming yourself for assuming that they were men. Suppose you had assumed that they were the Arisians themselves. Then what? After close scrutiny, even in the light of after-knowledge, we do not see how you could have changed the outcome.” It did not occur, even to the sagacious old admiral, that Kinnison need not have gone in. Lensmen always went in.

  “Well, anyway, they licked me, and that hurts,” Kinnison admitted, frankly. “So I’m going back to Arisia for more training, if they’ll give it to me. I may be gone quite a while, as it may take even Mentor a long time to increase the permeability of my skull enough so that an idea can filter through it in something under a century.”

  “Didn’t Mentor tell you never to go back there?”

  “No, sir.” Kinnison grinned boyishly. “He must’ve forgot it in my case—the only slip he ever made, I guess. That’s what gives me an out.”

  “Um…m…m.” Haynes pondered this startling bit of information. He knew, far better than young Kinnison could, the Arisian power of mind: he did not believe that Mentor of Arisia had ever forgotten anything, however tiny or unimportant. “It has never been done…they are a peculiar race: incomprehensible…but not vindictive. He may refuse you, but nothing worse—that is, if you do not cross the barrier without invitation. It’s a splendid idea, I think; but be very careful to strike that barrier free and at almost zero power—or else don’t strike it at all.”

  They shook hands, and in a space of minutes the speedster was again tearing through apace. Kinnison now knew exactly what he wanted to get, and he utilized every waking hour of that long trip for physical and mental exercise to prepare himself to take it. Thus the time did not seem long. He crept up to the barrier at a snail’s pace, stopping instantly as he touched it, and through that barrier he sent a thought.

  “Kimball Kinnison of Sol Three calling Mentor of Arisia. Is it permitted that I approach your planet?” He was neither brazen nor obsequious, but was matter-of-factly asking a simple question and expecting a simple reply.

  “It is permitted, Kimball Kinnison of Tellus,” a slow, deep, measured voice resounded in his brain. “Neutralize your controls. You will be landed.”

  He did so, and the inert speedster shot forward, to come to ground in a perfect landing at a regulation spaceport. He strode into the office, to confront the same grotesque entity who had measured him for his Lens not so long ago. Now, however, he stared straight into that entity’s unblinking eyes, in silence.

  “Ali, you have progresse
d. You realize now that vision is not always reliable. At our previous interview you took it for granted that what you saw must really exist, and did not wonder as to what our true shapes might be.”

  “I am wondering now, seriously,” Kinnison replied, “and, if it is permitted, I intend to stay here until I can see your true shapes.”

  “This?” and the figure changed instantly into that of an old, white-bearded, scholarly gentleman.

  “No. There is a vast difference between seeing something myself and having you show it to me. I realize fully that you can make me see you as anything you choose. You could appear to me as a perfect copy of myself, or as any other thing, person or object conceivable to my mind.”

  “Ah; your development has been eminently satisfactory. It is now permissible to tell you, youth, that your present quest, not for mere information, but for real knowledge, was expected.”

  “Huh? How could that be? I didn’t decide definitely, myself, until only a couple of weeks ago.”

  “It was inevitable. When we fitted your Lens we knew that you would return if you lived. As we recently informed that one known as Helmuth…”

  “Helmuth! You know, then, where…” Kinnison choked himself off. He would not ask for help in that—he would fight his own battles and bury his own dead. If they volunteered the information, well and good; but he would not ask it. Nor did the Arisian furnish it.

  “You are right,” the sage remarked, imperturbably. “For proper development it is essential that you secure that information for yourself.” Then he continued his previous thought:

  “As we told Helmuth recently, we have given your civilization an instrumentality—the Lens—by virtue of which it should be able to make itself secure throughout the galaxy. Having given it, we could do nothing more of real or permanent benefit until you Lensmen yourselves began to understand the true relationship between mind and Lens. That understanding has been inevitable; for long we have known that in time a certain few of your minds would become strong enough to discover that theretofore unknown relationship. As soon as any mind made that discovery it would of course return to Arisia, the source of the Lens, for additional instruction; which, equally of course, that mind could not have borne previously.