Chapter V: Part 5

“Better, but not good enough. She was on track all the way, but three point three was the best she could get . . . and I was _sure_ we had it licked this time . . . oh, _damn_!” The voice broke, ending almost in a wail.

“Steady, Joan!” Cloud was surprised at his companion’s funk. “Only three tenths of a second to get yet, is all.”

“_Only_ three tenths—what d’you mean, _only_?” the woman snapped. “Don’t you know that those three tenths of a second are just about in the same class as the three thousandths of a degree just above zero absolute?”

“Sure I do, but I know you, too. You’re really blasting, little chum. Both Jane and Katy, you remember, were just as apt to be off track as on. You’ll get it, Joan. As Vesta says, ‘Tail high sister!’”

“Thanks, Storm. I needed that. You see, to keep her on track we had to put in more internal memory banks and that slowed her down . . . we’ll have to dream up some way of getting the information out of those banks faster. . . .”

“Can you tinker her—what’ll the next version be? Margie?—up en route, or do you want to keep this ship near Sol while you work on it? Phil tells me I’ve got to flit for Chickladoria—and chop-chop, like quick.”

“Oh . . . Thlaskin and Maluleme have been crying in his beer, too, as well as yours?”

“I guess so, but that wasn’t it. It’s next on the list, an urgent—they’ve been screaming bloody murder for months. So, with or without a brain, I’ve got to blast off.”

“Start blasting as soon as you like, just as we are,” she decided instantly. “Much more important, at this stage, to work with you than to have Earth’s resources close by. Besides, I think everything we’re apt to need is already aboard—machine shop, electronics labs, materials, and experts.”

“QX.” He gave orders. Then:

“As for me, I’m going to hit the sack. I’m just about pooped.”

“I don’t wonder. That kind of stuff takes a lot of doing. ’Night, Storm.”

_Chapter 11_
▂▂▂▂▂▂JOAN THE TELEPATH

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, en route to the planet of the pink humanoids, Cloud was studying a scratch-chart of the First Galaxy. He had been working on the thing for weeks; had placed several hundred crossed circles, each representing a loose atomic vortex. He was scrawling weird-looking symbols and drawing freehand connecting lines when Joan came swishing into the “office.”

“Good morning, Effendi of Esoterica!” she greeted him gaily. “How’s the massive intellect? Firing on all forty barrels, I hope and trust?”

“Missing on all forty is more like it. Ideas are avoiding me in droves.” He looked her over amiably, in what he hoped she would think was a casual way.

He’d found himself doing quite a lot of that, lately . . . but she was _such_ a swell egg! Why hadn’t she ever married? What a waste _that_ was! Face a bit on the strong side for vapid calendar-girl prettiness, but. . . .

“But kind of attractive, at that, in her own gruesome way, eh?” she finished the thought for him.

“Huh?” Cloud gulped, and, for the first time in years, blushed scarlet; flushed to the tips of his ears.

“I’m sorry, Storm, believe me. I don’t think I was supposed to tell you—in fact, I know very well I wasn’t—but I’ve simply got to. It isn’t fair not to; besides, I’ve thought all along that Lensman Strong was wrong—that we’d go faster and farther if you knew than if you didn’t.”

“Oh—_that’s_ what Phil was holding out on me back there? I thought there was something fishy, but couldn’t spot it.”

“I was sure you did. So was Phil. You told me what the Tomingans call telepaths—snoopers? I _like_ that word; it’s so beautifully appropriate. Well, I’m snooping all the time. Not only while we’re working, as you thought, but _all_ the time, especially when you’re relaxed and . . . and off-guard, so to speak. I’ve been doing it ever since I first met you.”

Cloud blushed again. “So you knew exactly what I was thinking just then? You gave me a remarkably poor play-back.”

“The portrait was much too flattering. But we’ll skip that. Part of my job is to make a telepath out of you, so that you can show me with your mind—it can’t be done in words or symbols—what it is that makes a mathematical prodigy tick.”

“How are you figuring on going about it?”

“I don’t know—yet.”

“Phil tried, and so did a couple of Gray Lensmen, and I wasn’t holding back a thing . . . oh, he emphasized that you’re a _self-made_ telepath. A different angle of approach? How did you operate on yourself?”

“I don’t know that, either; but I hope to find out through you. I read, and studied, and tried, and all of a sudden—bang!—there it was. But words are useless; I’m coming into your mind. Now watch me closely, concentrate: _really_ concentrate, as hard as you possibly can. Ready? It goes like this . . . did you get it?”

“No. I couldn’t follow the details—it seemed like an instantaneous transition. Didn’t you have more to begin with than I’ve got?”

“I don’t think so . . . pretty sure I didn’t. I could receive—I think it’s impossible for anyone to become a telepath who can’t—but I couldn’t send a lick. My psi rating was a flat zero zero zero. Now try it again. Take a good, solid grip on a thought and _throw_ it at me.”

“QX. I’ll try.” Cloud’s forehead furrowed, his muscles tensed in effort. “Since you already know I’ve been wondering why you never married—why? Standards too high?”

“You might call it that.” It was the woman’s turn to blush, but her thought was clear and steady. Cloud was working with her better than he had ever worked with either Luda or Nadine. “Since the days of my teen-age crushes on tri-di idols I simply haven’t been able to develop any interest in a man who didn’t have as much of a brain as I have, and the only such I met were either already married or didn’t have anything _except_ a brain—which wouldn’t do, either, of course.”

“Of course not.” Cloud felt something stirring inside him that he thought completely dead, and tried, in near-panic fashion, to kill it again. He changed the subject abruptly. “No luck—I’m not getting through to you at all. We’d better start all over, at the bottom. What’s the first thing I’ve got to do to learn to be a snooper?”

“You must learn how to concentrate—intensively and in a very special way. You’re very good at ordinary concentration—especially mathematical stuff—now; but this kind is different—so much so as to be a difference in kind, not merely of degree.”

“Check. Point one, a new kind of concentration. Next?”

“No next. That’s all. When you get so you can concentrate correctly—I’ll coach you mind to mind on that, of course—we’ll concentrate together, first on one gateway, then another. Something will click into place, and there you’ll be.”

“I hope. But suppose it doesn’t? Can’t it be worked out? You’re on record as saying that the mind is simply a machine.”

“No, it can’t. The mind _is_ a machine; just as much a machine as one of your automatic pilots or one of my computers. The troubles are that it is almost infinitely more complex and that we do not understand its basic principles—the fundamental laws upon which it operates. We may _never_ understand them . . . the mind may very well be so tied in with the life-principle—or soul; call it whatever you please—as to be knowable only to God.”

“I’m glad you said that, Joan. I’m not formally religious, I suppose, but I do believe in a First Cause.”

“One must, who knows as much about the Macrocosmic All as you do. But it’s too early in the morning for very much of that sort of thing. What are you doing to that chart besides doodling all over it?”

“Those aren’t doodles, woman!” he protested. “They’re equations. In shorthand.”

“Equations, I apologize. Doctor Cloud, elucidate.”

“Doctor Janowick, I can’t. This is where you came in. I had just pursued an elusive wisp of thought into what turned out to be a cul de sac. I whammed my head against a solid concrete wall.” His light mood vanished as he went on:

“In spite of what everybody has always believed, I’ve _proved_ that loose atomic vortices are not accidental. They’re deliberate, every one of them, and. . . .”

“Yes, I heard you tell Phil so,” she interrupted. “I wanted to start screaming about your hypothesis then, and it’s taken superhuman self-control to keep me from screaming about it ever since. That kind of math, though, of course is ’way over my head. . . . For a long time I expected Phil to call up and blast you to a cinder, but he didn’t . . . you may be—_must_ be, I suppose—right.”

“I am right,” Cloud said, quietly. “Unless all the mathematics I know is basically, fundamentally fallacious, they’ve _got_ to be deliberate; they simply _can’t_ be accidental. On the other hand, except for a few we know about which don’t change the general picture in the least, I can’t see any more than you can how they can possibly be deliberate, either.”

“Are you trying to set up a paradox?”

“No. It’s already set up. I’m trying to knock it down.” Cloud’s thought died away; his mind became a mathematical wilderness of such complexity that the woman, able mathematician that she was and scan as she would, was lost in seconds.

He finally shrugged himself out of it. “Another blind alley,” he reported, sourly.

“With sufficient knowledge, any possible so-called paradox can be resolved,” Joan mused, her mind harking back to the, to her, starkly unbelievable hypothesis Cloud had stated so baldly. “But I simply _can’t_ believe it, Storm!”

“I can’t, either, hardly. However, it’s easier for me to believe that than that all our basics are false. So that makes it another part of our job to find out what, or who, or why.”

“Ouch! With a job of that magnitude on your mind, I’ll make myself scarce. When you come up for air sometime give me a call on the squawk-box and we’ll study concentration. ’Bye.” She turned, started for the door.

“Wait a minute, Joan—why not start the ground-work now?”

“That’s a thought—why not? But get away from that big table.” She placed two chairs and they sat down knee to knee; almost eye to eye. “Now, Storm, come in. _Really_ come in, this time; the first time you didn’t really even half try.”

“I did so!” he protested. “I tried then and I’m trying now. Just _how_ do I go about it?”

“I can’t tell you that, Storm; _nobody_ can tell you that.” She was thinking now, not talking. “There are no words, no symbology, even in the provinces of thought. And I can’t do it for you: you _must_ do it yourself. But if you can’t—and you really can’t be expected to, so soon—I’ll come into your mind and try to _show_ you what I mean.”

She did so. There was a moment of fitting; of snuggling . . . there was a warmly intimate contact, much warmer and much more intimate than anything telepathic that either had ever experienced before; but it was not what they were after. Joan tried a different approach.

“Well, if that won’t work, let’s try this. Just imagine, Storm, that every cell of my brain—no, let’s keep it on the immaterial level; every individual ultimate element of my mind—is a lock, but you can see exactly what the key must be like. You must make every corresponding unit of your mind into the appropriate key. . . . No? We’ll try again. Imagine that each element of my mind is half of a jigsaw puzzle—make yours fill out each picture. . . .”

“I can’t. Don’t you know, Joan, how many thousands of millions of. . . .”

“What of it?” she flared. “You do things fully as complex every time you blast a vortex. . . . Oh, that’s it! Treat it as though it were a problem in n-dimensional differential equations, but don’t let your subconscious do it alone—get right down there and work with it—do that and you’ll have it all!” She seized his hands, squeezed them hard, and spoke aloud, the better to drive home the intensity of her convictions. “Buckle down, Storm, and dig . . . you can do it, I know you can do it. I _know_ you can . . . dig in, big fellow . . . you don’t have to pay _too_ much attention to detail; get a chain started, like a zipper, and it’ll finish itself . . . dig, Storm, DIG!”

Storm dug. His jaw-muscles tightened into lumps. Sweat beaded his face and trickled down his chest under his shirt. And suddenly something happened. Not very much of anything, but something. Something more than mere contact, but not a penetration—more like a fusion—a fusion which, however instead of spreading rapidly to completion, as Joan had said it would, existed for the merest perceptible instant of time in an almost infinitesimal area and then vanished as instantaneously as it had come. But there was no doubt whatever that he had read, for an instant, a tiny portion of Joan’s mind; there was no chance whatever that she had sent him _that_ thought—in fact, she had been thinking at herself, not at him. And as he perceived the tenor of that thought he let go all his mental holds; tried frantically to bury the stolen thought so deeply that Joan would never, _never_ find out what it had been. . . .

No, not bury it, either. Flesh, rock, metal—any material substance was perfectly transparent to thought. What wasn’t? A thought-screen. He didn’t have one, of course, but he knew the formula, and if he thought about that formula hard enough it might create interference enough. The catch would be whether he could talk at the same time . . . he probably could, if the subject matter didn’t require concentration.

Joan, of course, knew instantly when Cloud pulled his mind away from hers; and, not waiting to ask why in words, drove in a probe to find out. Much to her surprise, however, her beam of mental force was stopped cold; she could not touch Cloud’s mind at all!

“A block!” she exclaimed unbelievingly. “A real dilly, too—as hard and tight as a D7M29Z screen! What did you do, anyway, Storm, and how? I didn’t feel you get in!”

He did not reply immediately. He was too busy; for, besides holding the screen-thought, he was also analyzing and studying the thought he had stolen from Joan: separating it out and arranging it into meaningful English words. It was amazing, how many words could be contained in one flashing, fleeting burst of thought.

“Joanie, my not-so-bright old friend,” she had been thinking, “you’ve simply got to cut out this silly damn foolishness and act your age. You _must not_ fall in love with him; there’d be nothing in it for either of you. You are thirty-four years old and he has had his Jo.”

“Storm!” she snapped. “Answer me! Or did. . . .” Her tone changed remarkably: “. . . did something . . . happen to you?”

“No, Joanie.” He shook his head and wrenched his attention back to reality. “But first, is whatever I’m doing really a mind-block, and is it really holding?”

“Yes—to both—curse it! And ‘Joanie’, eh? You _did_ get in. How did it go?”

“Not so good. Barely a touch. It didn’t spread after we got it started. Just one flash and it went out.”

“Hm . . . m . . . m. That’s funny. . . . Not the way it worked with me at all. However, I don’t see that it makes any difference whether you get it by drips and driblets or all at once, just so you get the full ability eventually. What was it you picked up the first time, Storm?”

“That’s one thing you’ll never know, if I have to hold this block forever.”

“Oh.” Joan blushed, vividly. “I know what it was, then, I think. But don’t you see. . . ?”

“No, I don’t see,” Cloud interrupted. “All I see is that it’s worse than being a Peeping Tom in a girls’ dormitory. I don’t like it. I don’t like any part of it.”

“You wouldn’t, of course—at first. Nevertheless, Storm, you and I have _got_ to work together, whether either of us likes what happens or not. So let’s get at it. Bring it out and look at it—let’s see if it’s so bad, really. It was just that I was afraid maybe I was going to fall in love with you and get burned to a crisp around the edges, wasn’t it?”

“That was part of it. You were wrong in two things, though. No matter how much I loved Jo—and I really did love her, you know. . . .”

“I know, Storm.” Her voice was very gentle. “Everybody knows you did. Not only did—you still do.”

“Yes. So much so that I thought I’d never be able to talk about her without going off the deep end. But I can, now. I’m beginning to think that perhaps Phil Strong was right. Perhaps a man can love twice in his life, in exactly the same way.”

The woman caught her breath and started to say something, then changed her mind. The man went on:

“The second point in error is that a woman at age thirty-four is not necessarily a doddering wreck with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.”

“Oh . . . I’m _so_ glad, Storm!” she breathed; then changed mood with an almost audible snap. “There! It’s done and your guard is down. It wasn’t too bad, was it?”

“Not a bit.” Cloud was surprised at how easily the thing had been ironed out. “You’re a prime number, Joanie—a slick, smooth operator. As smooth as five feet and two inches of tan velvet.”

“Uh-uh. Not me, so much; it’s just that we’re a very nicely-matched pair. But I think we’d better lay off a while before trying it again, don’t you?”

“Check. Let our minds—mine, anyway—get over the jitters and collywobbles.”

“Mine, too, brother; and I’ve got a sort of feeling that what that mind of yours is going to develop into, little by little, is something slightly different from ordinary telepathy. But in the meantime, you’d better get back to work.”

“I don’t know whether I can work up much enthusiasm for work right now or not.”

“Sure you can, if you try. What were you doing to that chart when I came in? What have you got there, anyway?”

“Come on over and I’ll show you.” They bent over the work-table, heads almost touching. “The pink area is the explored part of the First Galaxy. The marks represent all the loose vortices I know of. I’ve been applying all the criteria I can think of to give me some kind of a toe-hold, but up to the present moment I’m completely baffled.”

“Have you tried chronology yet? Peeling ’em off in layers—by centuries, say?”

“Not exactly, although I did run a correlation against time. Mostly been studying ’em either singly or en masse up to now. Might be worth a fling, though. Why? Got a hunch?”

“No. And no particular reason; just groping for more detailed data. Before you can solve any problem, you know, you must know exactly what the problem is—must be able to state it clearly. You can’t do that yet, can you?”

“You know I can’t. I’ve got some colored pins here somewhere . . . here they are. Read me the dates and I’ll stick colors accordingly.”

They soon ran out of colors; then continued with numbered-head thumb-tacks.

The job finished, they stood back and examined the results.

“See anything, Joan?”

“I see _something_, but before I mention it, give me a quick briefing on what you know already.”

Cloud thought for a minute. “Well, the distribution in space is not random, but there is no significant correlation with location, age, size, power, load-factor, or actual number of power plants. Nor with nature, condition, or age of the civilization of any planet. Nor with anything else I’ve been able to dream up.

“They aren’t random in time, either; but there again there’s no correlation with the age of the power-plant affected, the age-status of atomic power of any particular planet, or any other thing except one—there is an extremely high correlation—practically unity—with time itself.”

“I thought so,” Joan nodded. “That was what I noticed. The older, the fewer.”

“Exactly. But with your new classification, Joan, I think I see something else.” Cloud’s mathematical-prodigy’s mind pounced. “And _how_! Until very recently, Joan, the data will plot exactly on the ideal-growth-of-population curve.”

“Oh, they breed, some way or other. Nice—that gives us a. . . .”

“You said that, woman, I didn’t. I stated a fact; if you wish to extrapolate it, that’s your privilege—but it’s also your responsibility.”

“Huh! Don’t go pedantic on me. Haven’t you got any guesses?”

“Except for this recent jump, which we can probably ascribe to Fairchild and explosives, nary a guess. I can’t see any possible point of application.”

“Neither can I. But if that’s the only positive correlation you can find, and it’s just about unity, it must mean _something_.”

“Check. It’s _got_ to mean something. All we have to do is find out what . . . I think maybe I see something else.” Bending over, he sighted across the chart from various angles. “Too many pins. Let’s clear a belt through here.” They did so. “Will you read ’em to me in order, beginning with the oldest?”

“At your service, sir. Sol.”

Cloud stuck a pin in Sol.

“Galien—Salvador—DuPont—Eastman—Mercator—Centralia— Tressilia—Chickladoria—Crevenia—DeSilva—Wynor—Aldebaran. . . .”

“Hold it! Don’t want Aldebaran—can’t use it. Take a look at this!” For this first time Cloud’s voice showed excitement.

She looked, and saw a gently curving line of pins running three-quarters of the way across the chart. “Why—that’s a smooth curve—looks as though it could be the arc of a circle—clear across all explored space!” she exclaimed.

Cloud’s mind pounced again. “It is a circle—pretty close, that is, according to these rough figures. Will you read me the exact coordinates—spatial—from the book?”

She did so, and through Cloud’s mind there raced the appropriate equations of solid analytic geometry.

“Even closer. Now let’s apply a final refinement. From their proper motions we can put each star back to where it was at the vortex date. It’ll take a little time, but it may be worth it.”

It was. Cloud’s mien was solemn as he announced his final figures. “Those twelve suns all lay on the surface of a sphere. Radius, 53,327 parsecs, with a probable error of one point three zero parsecs—which, since the average density of the stars along that line is about point zero four five per cubic parsec, makes it as perfect a spherical surface as it is physically possible for it to be. The center of that sphere is almost exactly on the ecliptic; its coordinates are: Theta, 225°—12′—31.2647″; distance, 107.2259.”

“Good heavens! It’s _that_ exact? And _that_ far outside the Rim? That spoils my original idea of radiation from a center. But all of the twelve oldest vortices are on that surface, and _none_ of them are anywhere else!”

“So they are. Which gets us where, lady?”

“Nowhere that I can see, with a stupendous velocity.”

“You and me both. Another thing, why that particular time-space relationship in the first twelve? I can accept Tellus being first, because we had atomics first, but that logic doesn’t follow through. Instead, the time order goes from Sol through Galien and so on to Eastman—to the very edge of unexplored territory along that arc—then, jumping back to the other side of Sol, goes straight on to the edge of Civilization in the opposite direction. Can you play _that_ on any one of your brains, from Alice to Margie?”

“I don’t see how.”

“I don’t, either. That relationship certainly means something, too, but I’m damned if I can make any sense out of it. And what sense is there in a spherical surface that big? And why so ungodly accurate? Alphacent, there, is less than one parsec outside the surface, but it didn’t have a blow-up for over seven hundred years. How come? Anybody or anything capable of traveling that far could certainly travel half a parsec farther if he wanted to. And look at the time involved—over a thousand years! Assuming some purpose, what could it be? Human operations, or any other kind I know anything about, simply are not geared up to that kind of scope, either in space or in time. None of it makes any kind of sense.”

“So you consider it purely fortuitous that this surface is as truly spherical as the texture of the medium will permit?” she asked, loftily.

“No, I don’t, and you know I don’t—and don’t misquote me, woman! It’s too fantastically accurate to be accidental. And that ties right in with the previous paradox—that vortices can’t possibly be either accidental or deliberate.”

“From a semantic viewpoint, your phraseology is deplorable. The term ‘paradox’ is inadmissible—meaningless. We simply haven’t enough data. I simply _can’t_ believe, Storm, that those horrible things were set off on purpose.”

“Deplorable phraseology or not, I’ve got enough data to put the probability out beyond the nine-sigma point—the same probability as that an automatic screw-machine running six-thirty-two brass hex nuts would accidentally turn out a thirty-six-inch jet-ring made of pure titanite, diamond-ground, finished, and fitted. We’re getting nowhere faster and faster—with an acceleration of about 12 G’s instead of any simple velocity.”

He fell silent; remained silent so long that the woman spoke. “Well . . . what do you think we’d better do next?”

“All I can think of is to find out what’s out there at the center of that sphere . . . and then to see if we can find any other leads in this mess on the chart. I’ll call Phil.”

_Chapter 12_
▂▂▂▂▂▂VESTA PRACTICES SPACEAL

THE CONNECTION was made and he brought Lensman Strong up to date, concluding: “So will you please get hold of Planetography with a crash priority on anything they know about that point?”

“I’ll do that, Storm. I’ll call you back.”

Since Lensmen are potent beings, the call came soon.

“There’s one sun there,” Strong reported, “but it doesn’t amount to much. A red dwarf—it may or may not be a single. Unexplored. Astronomical data only.”

“How close did I come to it?”

“Allowing for proper motion, you speared it. Less than two hundredths of a parsec off. And there’s nothing else within twelve parsecs—stars are mighty thin out beyond the Rim, you know.”

“I know. That nails it, Phil. They don’t know, of course, whether it has any planets or not?”

“No . . . I see what you mean . . . shall I get a special on it for you?”

“I wish you would. It’d be worth while, I think.”

“So do I. I’ll call Haynes and ask him to rush a ship out there to get us a fine-tooth on it.”

“Thanks, Phil.”

“And there was something else. . . . Oh yes, your friend Fairchild. Narcotics wants him, badly.”

“I’m not surprised. Alive? That might take some doing.”

“Or dead. No difference, as long as they have his head for positive identification,” and at Cloud’s surprised expression Strong went on: “They don’t want him planting any more Trenconian broadleaf, is all, which he’ll keep on doing as long as he’s alive and loose.”

“I see. Wish I’d known sooner; we probably could have caught him on Tominga.”

“I doubt it. They’ve been checking back on him, and he’s a very, _very_ sharp operator. He makes long flits, fast . . . in peculiar directions. But if you stumble across him again, grab him or blast. . . .”

“Just a minute, chief. You mean to say the _Patrol_ can’t _find_ him?”

“Just that. He’s in with a big, strong mob; probably heads it. They’ve been looking for him ever since you found out that he wasn’t killed on Deka.”

“I’m . . . I’m speechless. But Graves . . . but Graves was dead, of course . . . didn’t _anybody_ know Fairchild’s personal pattern?”

“That’s exactly it; nobody that they could get hold of knows his _real_ pattern at all. All we’ve got that we can depend on are his retinals. That shows the kind of operator he is. So if you get a chance, blast him, but leave at least one eye whole and bring it in, in deep-freeze. Nothing else at the moment, is there?”

“Not that I know of. Clear ether, Phil!”

“Clear ether, Storm!”

The plate went black and Cloud turned soberly to Joan.

“Well, that clears Fairchild up, but doesn’t help with the real mystery. So, unless we can dig some more dope out of this stuff on the chart, we can’t do much until we get that finetooth.”

Joan left the room, and Cloud, after racking his brain for an hour, got up, shook himself, and went down the corridor to his “private” office—which had long since ceased to be private, as far as his friends were concerned—where he found Vesta and Thlaskin talking busily in spaceal. Or, rather, the Vegian was talking; the pilot was listening attentively.

“. . . think _I’m_ built, you ought to’ve seen _this_ tomato,” Vesta was narrating blithely. “What I mean, she’s a _dish_!” She went into a wrigglesome rhythm which, starting at the neck, flowed smoothly down her splendidly-modeled body to the ankles. “_Stacked?_ She’s stacked like Gilroy’s Tower, Buster—an honest-to-god DISH, believe me, and raring to go. We were on one of those long-week-end jaunts around the system—you know, one of those deals where things are pretty apt to get just a hair off the green at times. . . .”

“But hey!” Thlaskin protested. “You said yourself a while back you wasn’t old enough for that kind of monkey-business!”

“Oh, I wasn’t,” Vesta agreed, candidly enough. “I still ain’t. I just went along for the ride.”

“And your folks _let_ you?” Thlaskin was shocked.

“Natch.” Vesta was surprised. “Why not? If a tomato don’t learn the facts of life while she’s young how’s she going to decide what’s good for her when she grows up?”

“With or without a license, I got to butt into this,” Cloud announced, also in spaceal; seating himself on a couch and crossing his legs. He, too, was shocked; but he was also intensely curious. “Did you decide, Vesta?”

Before the girl could answer, however, Joan Janowick came strolling in.

“Is this a private brawl, or can anybody get in on it?” she asked, gaily.

“I invited myself in, so I’ll invite you, too. Come in and sit down.” He made room for her beside him and went on in English, speaking for her ear alone: “Just as well you don’t know spaceal. This story Vesta is telling would curl your hair.”

“Wake up, Junior.” Joan did not speak, but poured the thought directly into his mind. “D’you think that cat-girl—that _kitten_—can block _me_ out of her mind?”

“Oick! What a whiff! ’Scuse, please; my brain was out to lunch. But you’ll get an earful, sister Janowick.”

“It’ll be interesting in a way you haven’t thought of, too,” Joan went on. “Vegians are essentially feline, you know, and cats as a race are both fastidious and promiscuous. Thus, conflict. Is that what this is about?”

“Could be—I haven’t tried to read her.” Then, aloud:

“Go ahead, Vesta. Did the experience help you decide?”

“Oh, yes. I’m too finicky to be a very good mixer. There’s just too damn many people I simply can’t stand the smell of.”

“There’s that _smell_ thing again,” Thlaskin said. “You’ve harped on it before. You mean to say you people’s noses are _that_ sensitive?”

“Absolutely. No two people smell alike, you know. Some smell nice and some just plain stink. F’rinstance, the boss here smells just wonderful—I could hug him all day and love it. Doctor Janowick, too, she smells almost like the skipper. You’re nice, too, Thlaskin, and so is Maluleme, and Nadine. And Tommie ain’t bad; but a lot of the others are just too srizonified much for my stomach.”

“I see,” Cloud said. “You _do_ give some people a lot of room around here.”

“Yeah, and that’s what got this chick I was telling Thlaskin here about in such a jam. She’s been bending her elbow pretty free, and taking a jab or so of this and that between drinks. But she ain’t sozzled, y’understand, not by many a far piece; just lit up like Nyok spaceport. She’s maybe been a bit on the friendly side with a few of her friends, so this big bruiser—not a Vegian; no tail, even; an Aldebaranian or some-such-like and a Class A-Triple-Prime stinker—gets interested in a big way. Well, he smells just like a Tellurian skunk, so she brushes him off, kind of private-like, a few times, but it don’t take, so she finally has to give him the old heave-ho right out in front of everybody.

“‘You slimy stinker, I’ve told you a dozen times it’s no dice—you stink!’ she says, loud, clear, and plain. ‘This ship ain’t big enough to let me get far enough away from you to hold my breakfast down,’ she says, and this burns the ape plenty.

“‘Lookit here, babe,’ he says, coming to a boil, ‘Bend an ear while I tell _you_ something. No klevous Vegian chippie is going to play high and mighty with me, see? I’m fed up to the gozzle. So come down off your high horse right now, or I’ll. . . .’

“‘You’ll what?’ she snarls, and puts a hand behind her back. She’s seeing red now, and fit to be tied. ‘Make just one pass at me, you kedonolating slime-lizard,’ she says, ‘and I’ll bust your pfztikated skull wide open!’

“He goes for her then, but, being a Vegian, her footwork’s a lot better than his. She ducks, sidesteps, pulls her sap, and lets him have it, but good, right behind the ear. It takes the ship’s croaker an hour to bring him to, and the skipper’s so scared he blasts right back to Vegia and the croaker calls the hospital and tells ’em to have a meat-wagon standing by when we sit down.”

“A very interesting and touching tale, Vesta,” Cloud said then, in English, “but pretty rough language for a perfect lady, don’t you think?”

“How the hell else. . . .” Vesta started to reply in spaceal, then switched effortlessly to English: “How else can a lady, however ladylike she may be, talk in a language which, except for its highly technical aspects, is basically and completely profane, obscene, vulgar, lewd, coarse, and foul? Not that that bothers me, of course. . . .”

Nor did it, as Cloud well knew. When a Master of Languages studied a language he took it as a whole, no matter what that whole might be. Every nuance, every idiom, every possibility was mastered; and he used the language _as it was ordinarily used_, without prejudice or favor or motional bias.

“. . . but it’s so pitifully _inadequate_—there’s so much that’s completely missing! Thlaskin objected before, remember, that there wasn’t any word in spaceal he could use—_would_ use, I mean—to describe Maluleme as his wife. And my brother—Zambkptkn—I’ve mentioned him?”

“Once or twice,” Cloud said, dryly. This was the understatement of the trip.

“He’s a police officer. Not exactly like one of your Commissioners of Police, or Detective Inspector, but something like both. And in spaceal I can call him only one of four things, the English equivalents of which are ‘cop,’ ‘lawman,’ ‘flatfoot,’ and ‘bull.’ _What_ a language! But I started to tell his story in spaceal and I’m going to finish it in spaceal. It’ll be fun, in a way, to see how close I can come to saying what I want to say.”

Then, switching back to the lingua franca of deep space;

“So that’s how come my brother got into the act. The hospital called the cops, of course, so he was there with the meat-wagon and climbed aboard. He was all set to pinch the jane and throw her in the can, but when he got the whole story, and especially when she says she’s changed her mind about circulating around so much—it ain’t worth it, she says, she’d rather be an out-and-out hermit than have to have even one more fight with anybody who smelled like that—of course he let her go.”

“Let her _go_!” Cloud exclaimed. “How _could_ he?”

“Why, sure, boss.” Vesta, wide-eyed, gazed innocently at her captain. “The ape didn’t _die_, you know, and she wasn’t going to do it again, and he wasn’t a Vegian, so didn’t have any relatives or friends to go to the mat for him, and besides, anybody with one-tenth of one percent of a brain would know better than to keep on making passes at a frail after she warned him how bad he stunk. What _else_ could he do, chief?”

“What else, indeed?” Cloud said, in English. “I live; and—occasionally—I learn. Come on, Joan, let’s go and devote the imponderable force of our massed intellects to the multifarious problems of loose atomic vortices.”

On the way, Joan asked: “Our little Vesta surprised you, Storm?”

“Didn’t she you? She had me gasping like a fish.”

“Not so much. I know them pretty well and I used to breed cats. Scent: hearing—they can hear forty thousand cycles: the fact that they mature both mentally and physically long before they do sexually: some of their utterly barbarous customs: it’s quite a shock to learn how—‘queer,’ shall I say?—some of the Vegian mores are to us of other worlds.”

“‘Queer’ is certainly the word—as queer as a nine-credit bill. But confound it, Joan, I _like_ ’em!”

“So do I, Storm,” she replied quietly. “They _aren’t_ human, you know, and by Galactic standards they qualify. And now we’ll go and whack those vortices right on their center of impact.”

“We’ll do that, chum,” he said. Then, in perfect silence he went on in thought: “Chum? Sweetheart, I meant. . . . My God, _what_ a sweetheart you’d. . . .”

“Storm!” Joan half-shrieked, eyes wide in astonishment. “You’re _sending_!”

“I’m not either!” he declared, blushing furiously. “I can’t—you’re _snooping_!”

“I’m not snooping—I haven’t snooped a lick since I started talking. You _got_ it back there, Storm!” She seized both his hands and squeezed. “You _did_ it, and neither of us realized it ’til just this minute!”

_Chapter 13_
▂▂▂▂▂▂GAMES WITHIN GAMES

THE METHODS of operation of the _Vortex Blaster II_ had long since been worked out in detail. Approaching any planet Captain Ross, through channels, would ask permission of the various governments to fly in atmosphere, permission to use high explosive, permission to land and be serviced, and permission—after standard precautions—to grant planetary leave to his ship’s personnel. All this asking was not, of course, strictly necessary in his case, since every world having even one loose atomic vortex had been demanding long and insistently that Neal Cloud visit it next, but it was strictly according to protocol.

Astrogators had long since plotted the course through planetary atmosphere; not by the demands of the governments concerned and not by any ascending or descending order of violence of the vortices to be extinguished, but by the simple criterion of minimum flight-time ending at the pre-selected point of entry to the planet.

Thus neither Joan nor Cloud had anything much to do with planetary affairs until the chief pilot notified Joan that he was relinquishing control to her—which never happened until the vessel lay motionless with respect to the planet’s surface and with the tip of her nose three two zero zero point zero meters distant from the center of activity of the vortex.

Approaching Chickladoria, the routine was followed precisely up to the point where Joan’s mechanical brain took over. This time, however, the brain was not working, since Joan was in the throes of rebuilding “Lulu” into “Margie.” On Chickladoria, then, the chief pilot did the piloting and “Storm” Cloud did the blasting, and everything ran like clockwork. The ship landed at Malthester spaceport and everyone who could possibly be spared disembarked.

Ready to leave the ship, Cloud went to the computer room to make one last try. There, seated at desks, Joan and her four top experts were each completely surrounded by welters of reference books, pamphlets, wadded-up scratch-paper, tapes, and punched cards.

“Hi, Joan—Hi, fellows and gals—why don’t you break down and come on out and get some fresh air?”

“Sorry, Storm, but the answer is still ‘no’. We’ll need all this week, and probably more. . . .” Joan looked up at him and broke off. Her eyes widened and she whistled expressively. “Myohmy, ain’t he the _handsomest_ thing, though? I wish I _could_ go along, Storm, if only to see you lay ’em out in rows!”

For, since Chickladoria was a very warm planet—fully as hot as Tominga had been—Cloud was dressed even more lightly than he had been there; in sandals, breech-clout, and DeLameter harness, the shoulder-strap of the last-named bearing the three silver bars of a commander of the Galactic Patrol. He was not muscled like a gladiator, but his bearing was springily erect, his belly hard and flat, his shoulders were wide, his hips were narrow, and his skin was tanned to a smooth and even richness of brown.

“Wellwell! Not bad, Storm; not bad at all.” One of the men got up and looked him over carefully. “If I looked like that, Joan, I’d play hookey for a couple of days myself. But I wouldn’t dare to—in that kind of a get-up I’d look like something that had crawled out from under a rock and I’d get sunburned from here to there.”

“That’s your own fault, Joe,” a tall, lissom, brunette lieutenant chipped in. “You _could_ have the radiants on while you do your daily dozens, you know. Me, I’m mighty glad that _some_ of the men, and not only us women, like to look nice.”

“Wait a minute, Helen!” Cloud protested, blushing. “That’s not it, and you know it. These fellows don’t _have_ to mix socially with people who run around naked, and I do.”

“And how you hate it.” The other man offered mock sympathy, with a wide and cheerful grin. “_How_ you suffer—I don’t think. But that holster-harness. It looks regulation enough, but isn’t there somehing a little different about it?”

“Yes. Two things.” Cloud grinned back. “Left-handed, and the holster’s anchored so it can’t flop around. Don’t know as I ever told you, but ever since that alleged pirate burned my arm off I’ve been practising the gun-slick’s draw.”

“Did you get it?” Joan asked impishly. “How good are you?”

“Not bad—in fact, I’m getting plenty good,” Cloud admitted. “Come on up to the range sometime with a stop-watch and I’ll show you.”

“I’ll do that. Right now—shall we?”

“Uh-uh. Can’t. I’m due at the High Mayor’s Reception in twenty minutes, and besides, I want to breathe some air that hasn’t been rehabilitated, rejuvenated, recirculated, reprocessed, repurified, and rebreathed until it’s all worn out. Happy landings, gang—I’ll be thinking of you while I’m absorbing all that nice new oxygen and stuff.”

“Particularly the stuff—and especially the _liquid_ stuff!” Joe called after him just before he shut the door on his way out to join Thlaskin and Maluleme.

Going through customs was of course the merest formality, and an aircab whisked them into the city proper. Cloud really did enjoy himself as he strode along the walkway from the cabpark toward the Mayor’s . . . well, if not exactly a palace, it was close enough so as to make no difference. And he did attract plenty of attention. Not because of his dress or his build—most of the men on the street wore less than he did and many of them were just as trim and as fit—but because of the nature and variety of his bodily colors, which were literally astounding to these people, not one in twenty of whom had ever before seen a Tellurian in person.

For Chickladorians are pink; pink all over. Teeth, hair, skin, and nails; all pink. Not the pink of red blood showing through translucency, but that of opaque pigment. Most of their eyes, even—queerly triangular eyes with three lids instead of two—are of that same brick-reddish pink; although a few of the women have eyes of a dark and dusky green.

This visitor’s skin, however, was of a color so monstrous it simply had to be seen to be believed. In fact, it wasn’t the same color in any two places—it VARIED! His teeth were white; a horrible, dead-bone color. His lips, hair, and eyes—funny, round, flat-opening things—were of still other sheerly unbelievable colors—there wasn’t a _bit_ of natural, healthy pink about him anywhere!

Thus the crowds of Chickladorians studied him much more intensively than he studied them; and Maluleme, strutting along at his side, basked visibly in the limelight. And thus, except for the two Chickladorians at his side and except for the unobtrusive but efficient secret-service men who kept the crowding throng in hand, Cloud could very well have been mobbed.

The walk was very short, and at its end:

“How long we got to stay, boss?” Thlaskin asked, in spaceal. “As soon as we can get away we want to join our folks and grab a jet for home.”

“As far as I’m concerned you don’t need to stay at all, or even come. Why?”

“Just checking, is all. His Nibs sent us a special bid, so we got to at least show up. But he don’t know us from nothing, so after we tell him hello and dance a couple of rounds and slurp a couple of slugs we can scram and nobody’ll know it unless you spill.”

“No spill,” Cloud assured him. “You dance with Maluleme first. I’ll take the second—that’ll drive it in that she’s here. After that, flit as soon as you like. For the record, you’ll be here until the last gilot is picked clean.”

“Thanks, boss,” and the three, entering the extravagantly-decorated Grand Ballroom, were escorted ceremoniously up to the Presence and the Notables and their surrounding V. I. P.’s.

They were welcomed effusively, Cloud being informed through several different interpreters that he was the third-most-important human being who had ever lived. He made—through two interpreters, each checking the other’s accuracy—his usual deprecatory speech concerning the extinguishment of loose atomic vortices. He led the Grand March with the president’s wife, a lady whose name he did not quite catch and who, except for a pound or so of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and other baubles, was just as bare as Maluleme was. So was the equally heavily bejeweled mayor’s wife, with whom he had the first dance. She was neither young or slender, nor was she sexy. Then, as agreed, he danced with Maluleme, who was—but definitely!—all three.

However, as he circled the floor in time with the really excellent music, he thought, not of the attractive package of femininity in his arms—who was one of his crew and Thlaskin’s wife—but of Joan. She’d been training down, he’d noticed, and wearing more makeup, since those other girls had come aboard. She was getting to be a regular seven-sector callout—he’d _like_ to dance with Joan this way!

There were other dances; some with girls like Maluleme, some with women like Madam Mayor, most with in-betweens. There was food, which he enjoyed thoroughly. There were drinks; which, except for ceremonial beakers of fayalin with the president and the mayor, he did not touch. And, finally, there was the very comfortable bed in his special suite at the hotel. Instead of sleep, however, there came a thing he expected least of any—a sharp, carefully-narrowed Lensed thought.

“This is Tivor Nordquist of Tellus, Commander Cloud, on my Lens,” the thought flowed smoothly in. “I have waited until now so as not to startle you, not to make you show any sign of anything unusual going on. There must be no suspicion whatever that you even know there’s a Lensman on the planet.”

“I can take care of my part of that. One thing, though; I’ve got exactly one week to work with you. One week from today any possible excuse for me staying on Chickladoria goes p-f-f-t.”

“I know. One day should button it up, two at most. Here’s the print. I’m a narcotics man, really but. . . .”

“Oh—Fairchild, eh?”

“Yes. Ellington told me you’re quick on the uptake. Well, all leads to him via any drug channels fizzled out flat. So, since all these zwilnik mobs handle all kinds of corruption—racketeering, gambling, vice, and so on, as well as drugs—we decided to take the next-best line, which turned out to be gambling. After a lot of slow digging we found out that Fairchild’s gang controls at least four planets; Tominga, Vegia, Chickladoria, and Palmer III.”

“What? Why, those planets cover. . . .”

“Check. That’s what made the digging so tough, and that’s why they did it that way. And you’re scheduled for Vegia next, is why I’m meeting you here. But to get back to the story, we haven’t got dope enough to find Fairchild himself except by pure luck. So we decided to make Fairchild’s mob tell us where he is.”

“That’ll be a slick trick if we can do it.”

“Here’s how. _Somebody_ on this planet knows how to call Fairchild in emergencies, so we’ll create an emergency and he’ll do it.”

“My mind is open, but I’m a bit skeptical. What kind of an emergency have you got in mind?”

“Some of the details you’ll have to ad lib as you go along, but it’ll be, basically, bold-faced robbery without a blaster and with them jittery as glaidos because they can’t figure it. I was going to try to do it myself, but I can’t work without my Lens and I can’t come near the hot spots without their spy-rays catching the Lens and blowing the whole show. Doctor Janowick told Phil Strong that she could, without using her sense of perception and after only a short practise run, beat any crooked card game any gambler could dream up—something about random and nonrandom numbers. Can she?”

“Um-m . . . never thought of it . . . _random_ numbers . . . Oh, I see. Yes, she can. Especially the most-played one, that over-and-under-seven thing. And with a little telepathy thrown in, I can do the same with any crooked game they’ve got except a magnetically-controlled wheel; and I could do a fair job on that.”

“Better and better. You and Miss Janowick, then; and be sure and bring Vesta the Vegian along.”

“Vesta? Um . . . Maybe, at that. Adolescent Vegians not only can be, but are, interested in everything that goes on, everywhere. They’re born gamblers, and she’s already got a reputation for throwing money around regardless—and she’s rich enough to afford it. And in a winning streak she’ll stir up so much excitement that nobody will pay any attention to anybody else. However, things being what they are, I’ll have to be mighty careful about letting her go on a gambling spree.”

“Not too much so. Just hint that you won’t fire her if she takes a fling or two at the tables and she’ll be so happy about it and love you so much that she won’t even think of wondering why.”

And so it proved. After a long discussion of details with the Lensman, Cloud went to sleep. The following afternoon he went back to the ship and sought out Vesta, whom he found slinking dejectedly about with her tail almost dragging on the floor. Scarcely had he begun his suggestion, however, when:

“_Really_, chief?” Vesta’s tail snapped aloft, her pointed ears quivered with eagerness. She hugged him ecstatically, burying her face in the curve of his neck and inhaling deeply. “You zmell _zo_ wonderful, chief—but a wonderful man like you would _have_ to smell zo, wouldn’t he? I thought you’d smack me bow-legged if I even hinted at wanting to lay a ten-cento chip on the line. But I _know_ I can beat the games they’ve got on _this_ planet . . . and besides, I’ve been gone half a year and haven’t spent a hundred credits and I’ve learned nine languages including your cursed English. . . .”

She took out her book of Travelers’ Cheques and stared at it thoughtfully. “Maybe, though, just to be on the safe side, I’d better tear one of these out and hide it in my room. It’d be _awful_ to have to call my mother for jet fare home from the ’port. She and dad both’d yowl to high heaven—they’d claw me ragged.”