Gray Lensman (22 page)

In apparent reaction he turned pale and trembled, and the officer hastily took from his medicinal stores a bottle of choice old brandy.

"Here, drink this," he directed, proferring the glass.

Kinnison did so. More, he seized the bottle and drank that, too—all of it—a draft which would have literally turned him inside out a few months since. Then, to the captain's horrified disgust, he took from his filthy dungarees a packet of bentlam and began to chew it, idiotically blissful. Thence, and shortly, into oblivion.

"Poor devil . . . you poor, poor devil," the commander murmured, and had him put into a bunk.

I When he had come to and had had his pickup, the captain came and regarded him soberly.

| "You were a man once. An engineer—a top-bracket engineer—or I'm an oiler's pimp,"

he said levelly.

"Maybe," Kinnison replied, white and weak. "I'm all right yet, except once in a while . .

."

"I know," the captain frowned. "No cure?"

"Not a chance. Tried dozens. So . . ." and the Lensman spread out his hands in a hopeless gesture.

"Better tell me your name, anyway—your real name. That'll let your planet know you aren't. . ."

"Better not," the sufferer shook his aching head. "Folks think I'm dead. Let them keep on thinking so. Williams is the name, sir; William Williams, of Aldabaran II."

"As you say."

"How far are we from where I boarded you?"

"Close. Less than half a billion miles. This, the second, is our home planet; your asteroid belt is just outside the orbit of the fourth."

"I'll do a flit, then."

"As you say," the officer agreed, again. "But we'd like to . . ." and he extended a sheaf of currency.

"Rather not, sir, thanks. You see, the longer it takes me to earn another stake, the longer it'll be before . . ."

"I see. Thanks, anyway, for us all," and captain and mate helped the derelict embark.

They scarcely looked at him, scarcely dared look at each other . . . but. . .

Kinnison, for his part, was content. This story, too, would get around. It would be in Miners' Rest before he got back there, and it would help . . . help a lot.

He could not possibly let those officers know the truth, even though he realized full well that at that very moment they were thinking, pityingly:

"The poor devil. . . the poor, brave devil!"

The Gray Lensman went back to his mining with a will and with unimpaired vigor, for his distress aboard the ship had been sheerest acting. One small bottle of good brandy was scarcely a cocktail to the physique that had stood up under quart after quart of the crudest, wickedest, fieriest beverages known to space; that tiny morsel of bentlam— scarcely half a unit—affected him no more than a lozenge of licorice.

Three weeks. Twenty one days, each of twenty four G-P hours. At the end of that time, he had learned from the mind of the zwilnik, the Boskonian director of this, the Borovan solar system, would visit Miners' Rest, to attend some kind of meeting. His informant did not know what the meet-big was to be about, and he was not unduly curious about it. Kinnison, however, did and was.

The Lensman knew, or at least very shrewdly suspected, that that meeting was to be a regional conference of big-shot zwilniks; he was intensely curious to know all about everything that was to take place; and he was determined to be present Three weeks was lots of time. In fact, he should be able to complete his quota of heavy metal in two, or less. It was there, there was no question of that. Right out there were the meteors, uncountable thousands of millions of them, and a certain proportion of them carried values. The more and the harder he worked, the more of these worth-while wanderers of the void he would find. Wherefore he labored long, hard, and rapidly, and his store of high-test meteors grew apace.

To such good purpose did he use beam and Spalding drill that he was ready more than a week ahead of time. That was QX—he'd much rather be early than late. Something might have happened to hold him up—things did happen, too often—and he
had
to be at that meeting!

Thus it came about that, a few days before the all-important date, Kinnison's battered treasure-hunter blasted herself down to her second landing at Strongheart's Dock. This time the miner was welcomed, not as a stranger, but as a friend of long standing.

"Hi, Wild Bill!" Strongheart yelled at sight of the big spacehound. "Right on time, I see—glad to see you! Luck, too, I hope—lots of luck, and all good, I bet me—ain't it?"

"Ho, Strongheart!" the Lensman roared in return, pummel-ing the divekeeper affectionately. "Had a good trip, yeah—a fine trip. Struck a rich sector—twice as much as I got last time. Told you I'd be back in five or six weeks, and made it in five weeks and four days."

"Keeping tabs on the days, huh?"

"I'll say I do. With a thirst like mine a guy can't do nothing else—I tell you all my guts're dryer than any desert on the whole of Rhylce. Well, what're we waiting for? Check this plunder of mine in and let me get to going places and doing things!"

The business end of the visit was settled with neatness and dispatch. Dealer and miner understood each other thoroughly; each knew what could and what could not be done to the other. The meteors were tested and weighed. Supplies for the ensuing trip were bought. The guarantee and twenty four units of benny—QX. No argument. No hysterics. No bickering or quarreling or swearing. Everything on the green, aft the way. Gentlemen and friends. Kinnison turned over his keys, accepted a thick sheaf of currency, and, after the first formal drink with his host, set out upon the self-imposed, superstitious tour of the other hot spots which would bring him the favor—or at least would avert the active disfavor —of Klono, his spaceman's deity.

This time, however, that tour took longer. Upon his first ceremonial round he had entered each saloon in turn, had bought one drink of whatever was nearest, had tossed it down, and had gone on to the next place; unobserved and inconspicuous. Now, how different it all was!

Wherever he went he was the center of attention.

Men who had met him before flung themselves upon him with whoops of welcome; men who had never seen him clamored to drink with him; women, whether or not they knew him, fawned upon him and brought into play their every lure and wile. For not only was this man a hero and a celebrity of sorts; he was a lucky—or a skillful—miner whose every trip resulted in wads of money big enough to clog the under-jets of a freighter! Moreover, when he was lit up he threw it round regardless, and he was getting stewed as fast as he could swallow. Let's keep him here—or, if we can't do that, let's go along, wherever he goes!

This, too, was strictly according to the Lensman's expectations. Everybody knew that he did not do any serious drinking glass by glass at the bar, but bottle by bottle; that he did not buy individual drinks for his friends, but let them drink as deeply as they would from whatever container chanced then to be in hand; and his vast popularity gave him a sound excuse to begin his bottle-buying at the start instead of waiting until he got back to Strongheart's. He bought, then, several or many bottles and tins in each place, instead of a single drink. And, since everybody knew for a fact that he was a practically bottomless drinker, who was even to suspect that he barely moistened his gullet while the hangers-on were really emptying the bottles, cans, and flagons?

And during his real celebration at Strongheart's, while he drank enough, he did not drink too much. He waxed exceedingly happy and frolicsome, as before. He was as profligate, as extravagant in tips. He had the same sudden flashes of hot anger. He fought enthusiastically and awkwardly, as Wild Bill Williams did, although only once or twice, that time; and he did not have to draw his DeLameter at all—he was so well known and so beloved! He sang as loudly and as raucously, and with the same fine taste in madrigals.

Therefore, when the infiltration of thought-screened men warned him that the meeting was about to be called Kinnison was ready. He was in fact cold sober when he began his tuneful, last-two-bottles trip up the street, and he was almost as sober when he returned to "Base," empty of bottles and pockets, to make the usual attempt to obtain more money from Strongheart and to compromise by taking his farewell chew of bentlam instead.

Nor was he unduly put out by the fact that both Strongheart and the zwilnik were now wearing screens. He had taken it for granted that they might be, and had planned accordingly. He seized the packet as avidly as before, chewed its contents as ecstatically, and slumped down as helplessly and as idiotically. That much of the show, at least, was real. Twenty four units of that drug will paralyze
any
human body, make it assume the unmistakable pose and stupefied mien of the bentlam eater. But Kinnison's mind was not an ordinary one; the dose which would have rendered any bona-fide ''miner's brain as helpless as his body did not affect the Lensman's new equipment at all. Alcohol and bentlam together were bad, but the Lensman was sober. Therefore, if

anything, the drugging of his body only made it easier to dissociate his new mind from it.

Furthermore, he need not waste any thought in making it act There was only one way it could act, now, and Kinnison let his new senses roam abroad without even thinking of the body he was leaving behind him.

In view of the rigorous orders from higher up the conference room was heavily guarded by screened men; no one except old and trusted employees were allowed to enter it, and they were also protected. Nevertheless, Kinnison got in, by proxy.

A clever pick-pocket brushed against a screened waiter who was about to enter the sacred precincts, lightning fingers flicking a switch. The waiter began to protest—then forgot what he was going to say, even as the pick-pocket forgot completely the deed he had just done. The waiter in turn was a trifle clumsy in serving a certain Big Shot, but earned no rebuke thereby; for the latter forgot the offense almost instantly. Under Kinnison's control the director fumbled at his screen-generator for a moment, loosening slightly a small but important resistor. That done, the Lensman withdrew delicately and the meeting was an open book.

• "Before we do anything," the director began, "Show me that all your screens are on."

He bared his own—it would have taken an expert service man an hour to find that it was not functioning perfectly.

"Poppycock!" snorted the zwilnik. "Who in all the hells of space thinks that a Lensman would—or
could—
come to Euphrosyne?"

"Nobody can tell what this particular Lensman can or can't do, and nobody knows what he's doing until just before he dies. Hence the strictness. You've searched everybody here, of course?"

"Everybody," Strongheart averred, "even the drunks and the dopes. The whole building is screened, besides the screens we're wearing."

"The dopes don't count, of course, provided they're really doped." No one except the Gray Lensman himself could possibly conceive of a Lensman being—not seeming to be, but actually
being—
a drunken sot, to say nothing of being a confirmed addict of any drug. "By the way, who is this Wild Bill Williams we've been hearing about?"

Strongheart and his friend looked at each other and laughed. "I checked up on him early,"

the zwilnik chuckled. "He isn't the Lensman, of course, but I thought at first he might be an agent We frisked him and his ship thoroughly—no dice—and checked back on him as a miner, four solar systems back. He's clean, anyway; this is his second bender here. He's been guzzling everything in stock for a week, getting more pie-eyed every day, and Strongheart and I just put him to bed with twenty four units of benny. You know what
that
means, don't you?"

"Your own benny or his?" the director asked. "My own. That's why I know he's clean. All the other dopes are too. The drunks we gave the bum's rush, like you told us to."

"QX. I don't think there's any danger, myself—I think the hot-shot Lensman they're afraid of is still working Bronseca—but these orders not to take any chances at all come from

'way, 'way up."

"How about this new system they're working on, that nobody knows his boss any more?

Hooey, I call it."

"Not ready yet. They haven't been able to invent an absolutely safe one that'll handle the work. In the meantime, we're using these books. Cumbersome, but absolutely safe, they say, unless and until the enemy gets onto the idea. Then one group will go into the lethal chambers of the Patrol and the rest of us will use something else. Some say this code can't be cracked; others say any code can be read in time. Anyway here's your orders. Pass them along. Give me your stuff and we'll have supper and a few drinks."

They ate. They drank. They enjoyed an evening and a night of high revelry and low dissipation, each to his taste; each secure in the knowledge that his thought-screen was one hundred percent effective against the one enemy he really feared. Indeed, the screens were that effective—then—since the Lensman, having learned from the director all he knew, had restored the generator to full efficiency in the instant of his relinquishment of control.

Although the heads of the zwilniks, and therefore their minds, were secure against Kinnison's prying, the books of record were not. And, though his body was lying helpless, inert upon a drug-fiend's cot, his sense of perception read those books; if not as readily as though they were in his hands and open, yet readily enough. And, far off in space, a power-brained Lensman yclept Worsel recorded upon imperishable metal a detailed account, including names, dates, facts, and figures, of all the doings of all the zwilniks of a solar system!

The information was coded, it is true; but, since Kinnison knew the key, it might just as well have been printed in English. To the later consternation of Narcotics, however, that tape was sent in under Lensman's Seal—it could not be read until the Gray Lensman gave the word.

In twenty four hours Kinnison recovered from the effects of his debauch. He got his keys from Strongheart. He left the asteroid. He knew the mighty intellect with whom he had next to deal, he knew where that entity was to be found; but, sad to say, he had positively no idea at all as to what he was going to do or how he was going to do it.