Chapter XXI

When Worsel's hard-driven call impinged upon the port admiral's lens, Haynes dropped everything to take the report himself. Characteristically Worsel sent first and Haynes first recorded a complete statement of the successful mission to Jarnevon. Last came personalities, the tale of Kinnison's ordeal and of his present plight.

"Are they following you in force, or can't you tell?"

"Nothing has been detectable, and at the time of our departure there had been no suggestion of any such action," Worsel replied carefully.

"We'll come in force, anyway, and fast. Keep him alive until we meet you," Haynes urged, and disconnected.

It was an unheard-of occurrence for the port admiral to turn over his very busy and extremely important desk to a subordinate without notice and without giving him detailed instructions, but Haynes did it now.

"Take charge of everything, Southworth!" he snapped. "I'm called away--emergency. Kinnison found Boskone--got away--hurt--I'm going after him in the _Dauntless_. Taking the new flotilla with me. Time indefinite--probably a few weeks."

He strode toward the communicator desk. The _Dauntless_ was, as always, completely serviced and ready for any emergency. Where was that fleet of her sister ships, on its shakedown cruise? He'd shake them down! They had with them the new hospital ship, too--the only Red Cross ship in space that could leg it, parsec for parsec, with the _Dauntless_.

"Get me Navigations.... Figure best point of rendezvous for the _Dauntless_ and Flotilla ZKD, both at full blast, en route to Lundmark's Nebula. Fifteen minutes departure. Figure approximate time of meeting with speedster, also at full blast, leaving that nebula hour nine fourteen today. Correction! Cancel speedster meeting; we can compute that more accurately later. Advise adjutant. Vice-Admiral Southworth will send order, through channels. Get me Base Hospital.... Lacy, please.... Kinnison's hurt, sawbones, bad. I'm going out after him. Coming along?"

"Yes. How about--"

"On the green. Flotilla ZKD, including your new two-hundred-million-credit hospital, is going along. Slip twelve, _Dauntless_, eleven and one half minutes from now. Hipe!" And the surgeon general "hiped."

Two minutes before the scheduled take-off Base Navigations called the chief navigating officer of the _Dauntless_.

"Course to rendezvous with Flotilla ZKD latitude three fifty-four dash thirty longitude nineteen dash forty-two time approximately twelve dash seven dash twenty-six place one dash three dash oh outside arbitrary galactic rim check and repeat," rattled from the speaker without pause or punctuation. Nevertheless, the chief navigator got it, recorded it, checked and repeated it.

"Figures only approximations because of lack of exact data on variations in density of medium and on distance necessarily lost in detouring stars," the speaker chattered on. "Suggest instructing your second navigator to communicate with navigating officers Flotilla ZKD at time twelve dash oh dash oh to correct courses to compensate unavoidably erroneous assumptions in computation Base Navigations off."

"I'll say he's off--'way off!" growled the second. "What does he think I am--a complete nitwit? Pretty soon he'll be telling me that two plus two equals four point oh."

* * * * *

The fifteen-second warning bell sounded. Every man came to the ready at his post, and precisely upon the designated second the superdreadnought blasted off. For six miles she rose inert upon her under jets, sirens and flaring lights clearing her way. Then she went free, her needle prow slanted sharply upward, her full battery of main driving projectors burst into action, and to all intents and purposes she vanished.

The Earth fell away from her at an incredible rate, dwindling away into invisibility in less than a minute. In two minutes the Sun itself was merely a bright star, in five it had merged indistinguishably into the sharply defined, brilliantly white belt of the Milky Way.

Hour after hour, day after day, the _Dauntless_ hurtled through space, swinging almost imperceptibly this way and that to avoid the dense ether in the neighborhood of suns through which the designated course would have led; but never leaving far or for long the direct line, almost exactly in the equatorial plane of the Galaxy, between Tellus and the place of meeting. Behind her the Milky Way clotted, condensed, gathered itself together; before her and around her the stars began rapidly to thin out. Finally there were no more stars in front of her. She had reached the "arbitrary rim" of the Galaxy, and the second navigator plugged into Communications.

"Please get me Flotilla ZDK, Flagship Navigations," he requested; and, as a clean-cut young face appeared upon his plate: "Hi, Harvey, old spacehound! Fancy meeting you out here! It's a small Universe, ain't it? Say, did that crumb back there at Base tell you, too, to be sure and start checking course before you overran the rendezvous? If he was singling me out to make that pass at, I'm going to take steps, and not through channels, either."

"Yeah, he told me the same. I thought it was funny, too--an oiler's boy would know enough to do that without being told. We figured maybe he was jittery on account of us meeting the admiral or something. What's burned out all the jets, Paul, to get the big brass hats 'way out here and all dithered up, and to pull us offa the cruise this way? Must be a hell of an important flit! You're computing the Old Man himself; you oughta know something. What's all this about a speedster that we're going to escort? Spill it--give us the dope!"

"I don't know a thing, Harvey, honest, any more than you do. They didn't put out a word. Well, we'd better be getting onto the course--'to compensate unavoidably erroneous assumptions in computation,'" he mimicked caustically. "What do you read on my lambda? Fourteen--three--oh point six--decrement--"

The conversation became a technical jargon; because of which, however, the courses of the flying spaceships changed subtly. The flotilla swung around, through a small arc of a circle of prodigious radius, decreasing by a tenth its driving force. Up to it the _Dauntless_ crept; through it and into the van. Then again in cone formation, but with fifty-five units instead of fifty-four, the flotilla screamed forward at maximum blast.

Well before the calculated time of meeting the speedster a Velantian Lensman who knew Worsel well put himself en rapport with him and sent a thought out far ahead of the flying squadron. It found its goal--Lensmen of that race, as has been brought out, have always been extraordinarily capable communicators--and once more the course was altered slightly. In due time Worsel reported that he could detect the fleet, and shortly thereafter:

"Worsel says to cut your drive to zero," the Velantian transmitted. "He's coming up. He's close. He's going to go inert and start driving. We're to stay free until we see what his intrinsic velocity is. Watch for his flare."

It was a weird sensation, this of knowing that a speedster--quite a sizable chunk of boat, really--was almost in their midst, and yet having all their instruments, even the electros, register empty space.

There it was! The flare of the driving blast, a brilliant streamer of fierce white light, sprang into being and drifted rapidly away to one side of their course. When it had attained a safe distance:

"All ships of the flotilla except the _Dauntless_ go inert," Haynes directed. Then, to his own pilot, "Back us off a bit, Henderson, and do the same," and the new flagship also went inert.

"How can I get onto the _Pasteur_ the quickest, Haynes?" Lacy demanded.

"Take a gig," the admiral grunted. "Strapped down, you can use as much acceleration as you like. Three G's is all we can use without warning and preparation."

* * * * *

There followed a curious and fascinating spectacle, for the hospital ship had an intrinsic velocity entirely different from that of either Kinnison's speedster or Lacy's powerful gig. The _Pasteur_, gravity pads cut to zero, was braking down by means of her under jets at a conservative one point four gravities, since hospital ships were not allowed to use the brutal inert accelerations employed as a matter of course by ships of war.

The gig was on her brakes at five gravities, all that Lacy wanted to take--but the speedster! Worsel had put his patient into a pressure pack and had hung him on suspension, and was "balancing her down on her tail" at everything he could stand--a full eleven gravities!

But even at that, the gig first matched the velocity of the hospital ship. The intrinsics of those two were at least of the same order of magnitude, since both had come from the same galaxy. Therefore, Lacy boarded the Red Cross vessel and was escorted to the office of the chief nurse while Worsel was still blasting at eleven G's--fifty thousand miles distant then and getting farther away by the second--to kill the speedster's Lundmarkian intrinsic velocity. Nor could the tractors of the warships be of any assistance--the speedster's own vicious jets were fully capable of supplying more acceleration than even unhuman Worsel could endure!

"How do you do, Dr. Lacy? Everything is ready." Clarrissa MacDougall met him, hand outstretched. Her saucy white cap was worn as jerkily cocked as ever; perhaps even more so, now that it was emblazoned with the cross-surmounted wedge which is the insignia of sector chief nurse. Her flaming hair was as gorgeous, her smile was as radiant, her bearing as confidently--Kinnison has said of her more than once that she is the only person he has ever known who can strut sitting down!--as calmly poised. "I'm very glad to see you, doctor. It's been quite a while--" Her voice died away, for the man was looking at her with an expression defying analysis.

For Lacy was thunderstruck. If he had ever known it--and he must have--he had forgotten completely that MacDougall had this ship. This was awful--terrible!

"Oh, yes ... yes, of course. How do you do? Mighty glad to see you again. How's everything going?" He pumped her hand vigorously, thinking frantically the while what he would--what he _could_--say next. "Oh, by the way, who is to be in charge of the operating room?"

"Why, I am, of course," she replied in surprise. "Who else would be?"

"_Anyone_ else," he wanted to say, but did not--then. "Why, that isn't at all necessary. I would suggest--"

"You'll suggest nothing of the kind!" She stared at him intently; then, as she realized what his expression really meant--she had never before seen such a look of pitying anguish upon his usually sternly professional face--her own turned white and both hands flew to her throat.

"Not Kim, Lacy!" she gasped. Gone now was everything of poise, of insouciance, which had so characterized her a moment before. She who had worked unflinchingly upon all sorts of dismembered, fragmentary, maimed and mangled men was now a pleading, stricken, desperately frightened girl. "Not Kim--please! Oh, merciful God, don't let it be my Kim!"

"You _can't_ be there, Mac." He did not need to tell her. She knew; he knew that she knew. "Somebody else--_anybody_ else."

"No!" came the hot negative, although the blood drained completely from the chief nurse's face, leaving it as white as the immaculate uniform she wore. Her eyes were black, burning holes. "It's my job, Lacy, in more ways than one. Do you think that I would _ever_ let anyone else work on _him_?" she finished passionately.

"You'll have to," he declared. "I didn't want to tell you this, but he's a ghastly mess. Altogether too much so for any woman, to say nothing of one who loves him." This, from a surgeon of Lacy's long and wide experience, was an unthinkable statement. Nevertheless:

"All the more reason why I've got to do it. No matter what shape he's in, I'll let no one else work on my Kim."

"I say no. That's an order--official!"

"Damn such orders!" she flamed. "There's nothing back of it--you know that as well as I do!"

"See here, young woman--"

"Do you think that you can get away with ordering me not to perform the very duties I have taken an oath to do?" she stormed. "And even if it were not my job, I'd come in and work on him if I had to get a torch and cut the ship apart, plate by plate, to do it! The only way you can keep me out of that operating room, Lacy, is to have about ten of your men put me into a strait jacket--and if you do that I'll have you kicked out of the service bodily. You know that I could and that I would!"

"QX, MacDougall, you win." She had him there. This girl could and would do exactly that. "But if you faint, I swear that I'll make you wish--"

"You know me better than that, doctor." She was cold now as a woman of marble. "If he dies, I'll die, too, right then. But if he lives, I'll stand by as long as I can do a single thing, however small, to help."

"You would, at that," the surgeon admitted. "Probably you would be able to hold together better than anyone else could. But there'll be after-effects in your case, you know."

"I know." Her voice was bleak. "I'll live through them--if Kim lives." She became all nurse in the course of a breath. White, cold, inhuman; strung to highest tension and yet placidly calm, as only a truly loving woman in life's great crises can be. "You have had reports on him, doctor. What is your provisional diagnosis?"

"Something like elephantiasis, only worse, affecting both arms and both legs. Drastic amputations indicated. Eye sockets require attention. Various multiple and compound fractures. Punctured and incised wounds. Traumatism, ecchymosis, extensive extravasations, œdema. Profound systemic shock, of course. The prognosis, however, seems to be distinctly favorable, as far as we can tell."

"Oh, I'm glad of that!" she breathed, the woman for a moment showing through the armor of the nurse. She had not dared even to think of prognosis. Then she had a thought. "Is that really true, or are you just giving me a shot in the arm?" she demanded.

"The truth--strictly," he assured her. "Worsel has an excellent sense of perception, and he has reported fully and clearly. Kinnison's mind, brain, and spine are not affected in any way, and we should be able to save his life. That is the one good feature of the whole thing."

* * * * *

The speedster finally matched the velocity of the hospital ship. She went free, flashed up to the _Pasteur_, inerted, and maneuvered briefly. The larger vessel engulfed the smaller. The Gray Lensman was carried into the operating room. The anæsthetist approached the table and Lacy was stunned at a thought from Kinnison.

"Never mind the anæsthetic, Dr. Lacy. You can't make me unconscious without killing me. Go ahead with your work. I'll hold a nerve block while you're doing what has to be done. I can do it perfectly--I've had lots of practice."

"But we can't, man!" Lacy exclaimed. "You've got to be under a general for this job--we can't have you conscious. You're raving, I think. It will work, surely; it always has. Let us try it, anyway, won't you?"

"Sure. It'll save me the trouble of holding the block, even though it won't do anything else. Go ahead."

The attendant physician did so, with the same cool skill and to the same end point as in thousands of similar and successful undertakings. At its conclusion: "Gone now, aren't you, Kinnison?" Lacy asked, through his Lens.

"No," came the surprising reply. "Physically, it worked. I can't feel a thing and I can't move a muscle, but mentally I am as wide awake as I ever was."

"But you shouldn't be!" Lacy protested. "Perhaps you were right, at that--we can't give you much more without danger of collapse. But you've _got_ to be unconscious! Isn't there some way in which you can be made so?"

"Yes, there is. But why do I have to be unconscious?" Kinnison asked curiously.

"To avoid mental shock--seriously damaging," the surgeon explained. "In your case particularly the mental aspect is much graver than the purely physical one."

"Maybe you're right but you can't do it with drugs. Call Worsel; he has done it before. He had me unconscious most of the way over here, except when he had to give me a drink or something to eat. He's the only man this side of Arisia who can operate on my mind."

Worsel came. "Sleep, my friend," he commanded, gently but firmly. "Sleep profoundly, body and mind, with no physical or mental sensations, no consciousness, no perception even of the passage of time. Sleep until someone having authority to do so bids you awaken."

And Kinnison slept; so deeply that even Lacy's probing Lens could elicit no response.

"He will _stay_ that way?" the surgeon asked in awe.

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"Indefinitely. Until one of you doctors or nurses tells him to wake up, or until he dies for lack of food or water."

"We will see to it that he gets nourishment. He would make a much better recovery if we could keep him in that state until his injuries are almost healed. Would that do him harm, think you?"

"None whatever."

Then the surgeons and the nurses went to work. Lacy was not guilty of exaggeration when he described Kinnison as being a "ghastly mess." He was all of that. The job was long and hard. It was heartbreaking, even for those to whom Kinnison was merely another case, not a beloved personality. What they had to do they did, and the white marble chief nurse carried on through every soul-wrenching second, through every shocking, searing motion of it. She did her part, stoically, unflinchingly, as efficiently as though the patient upon the table were a total stranger undergoing a simple appendectomy and not the one man in her entire universe suffering radical dismemberment. Nor did she faint--then.

* * * * *

Back in Base Hospital, then, time wore on until Lacy decided that the Lensman could be aroused from his trance. Clarrissa it was who woke him up. She had fought for the privilege; first claiming it as a right and then threatening to commit mayhem upon the person of anyone else who dared even to think of doing it.

"Wake up, Kim, dear," she whispered. "The worst of it is over now. You are getting well."

The Gray Lensman came to instantly, in full command of every faculty, knowing everything that had happened up to the instant of his hypnosis by Worsel. He stiffened, ready to establish again the nerve block against the intolerable agony to which he had been subjected so long, but there was no need. His body was, for the first time in untold æons, free from pain; and he relaxed blissfully, reveling in the sheer comfort of it.

"I'm _so_ glad that you're awake, Kim," the nurse went on. "I know that you can't talk to me--we can't unbandage your jaw until next week--and you can't think at me, either, because your new Lens hasn't come yet. But I can talk to you and you can listen. Don't be discouraged, Kim. Don't let it get you down. I love you just as much as I ever did, and as soon as you can talk we're going to get married. I am going to take care of you--"

"Don't 'poor dear' me, Mac," he interrupted her with a vigorous thought. "You didn't say it, I know, but you were thinking it. I'm not half as helpless as you think I am. I can still communicate, and I can see as well as I ever could, or better. And if you think that I'm going to let you marry me to take care of me, you're crazy."

"You're raving! Delirious! Stark, staring mad!" She started back, then controlled herself with an effort. "Maybe you can think at people without a Lens--of course you can, since you just did, at me--but you _can't_ see, Kim, possibly. Believe me, boy, I _know_ that you can't. I was there--"

"I can, though," he insisted. "I got a lot of stuff on my second trip to Arisia that I couldn't let anybody know about then, but I can now. I've got as good a sense of perception as Tregonsee has--maybe better. To prove it, you look thin, worn--whittled down to a nub. You've been working too hard--on me."

"Deduction," she scoffed. "You would know that I would."

"QX. How about those roses over there on the table? White ones, yellow ones, and red ones? With ferns?"

"You can smell them, perhaps"--dubiously. Then, with more assurance: "You would know that practically all the flowers known to botany would be here."

"Well, I'll count 'em and point 'em out to you, then--or, better, how about that little gold locket, with 'CM' engraved on it, that you're wearing under your uniform? I can't smell that, nor the picture in it--" The man's thought faltered in embarrassment. "_My_ picture! Klono's whiskers, Mac, where did you get that--and why?"

"It's a reduction that Admiral Haynes let me have made. I am wearing it because I love you--I've said that before."

The girl's entrancing smile was now in full evidence. She knew now that he _could_ see, that he would never be the helpless hulk which she had so gallingly thought him doomed to become, and her spirits rose in ecstatic relief. But he would _never_ take the initiative now. Well, then, she would; and this was as good an opening as she ever would have with the stubborn brute. Therefore:

"More than that, as I said before, I am going to marry you, whether you like it or not." She blushed a heavenly--and discordant--magenta, but went on unfalteringly: "And not out of pity, either, Kim, or just to take care of you. It's older than that--much older."

"It can't be done, Mac." His thought was a protest to high Heaven at the injustice of Fate. "I've thought it over out in space a thousand times--thought until I was black in the face--but I get the same result every time. It's just simply no soap. You are much too fine a woman--too splendid, too vital, too much of everything a woman should be--to be tied down for life to a thing that's half steel, rubber, and phenoline. It just simply is not on the wheel, that's all."

"You're full of pickles, Kim." Gone was all her uncertainty and nervousness. She was calm, poised; glowing with a transcendent inward beauty. "I didn't really _know_ until this minute that you love me, too, but I do now. Don't you realize, you big, dumb, wonderful clunker, that as long as there's one single, little bit of a piece of you left alive I'll love that piece more than I ever could any other man's entire being?"

"But I _can't_, I tell you!" He groaned the thought. "I can't and I won't! My job isn't done yet, either, and the next time they'll probably get me. I _can't_ let you waste yourself, Mac, on a fraction of a man for a fraction of a lifetime!"

"QX, Gray Lensman." Clarrissa was serene, radiantly untroubled. She could make things come out right now; everything was on the green. "We'll put this back up on the shelf for a while. I'm afraid that I have been terribly remiss in my duties as a nurse. Patients mustn't be excited or quarreled with, you know."

"That's another thing. How come you, a sector chief, to be on ordinary room duty, and night duty at that?"

"Sector chiefs assign duties, don't they?" she retorted sunnily. "Now I'll give you a rub and change some of these dressings."