The Greatest Works of E. E. Smith. E. E. Smith
been expecting it to blow its top for the last hour, and I don’t know whether we’d ever have got it meshed in again or not.”
“QX on location and orbit,” Kinnison reported to the as yet invisible space-port a few minutes later. “Now, what about that Lensman? What happened?”
“The usual thing,” came the emotionless response. “It happens to altogether too many Lensmen who can see, in spite of everything we can tell them. He insisted upon going out after his zwilniks in a ground-car, and of course we had to let him go. He became confused, lost control, let something—possibly a zwilnik’s bomb—get under his leading edge, and the wind and the trencos did the rest. He was Lageston of Mercator V—a good man, too. What is your pressure now?”
“Five hundred millimeters.”
“Slow down. Now, if you cannot conquer the tendency to believe your eyes, you had better shut off your visiplates and watch only the pressure gauge.”
“Being warned, I can disbelieve my eyes, I think,” and for a minute or so communication ceased.
At a startled oath from vanBuskirk, Kinnison glanced into the plate and it needed all his nerve to keep from wrenching savagely at the controls. For the whole planet was tipping, lurching, spinning; gyrating madly in a frenzy of impossible motions; and even as the Patrolmen stared a huge mass of something shot directly toward the ship!
“Sheer off, Kim!” yelled the Valerian.
“Hold it, Bus,” cautioned the Lensman. “That’s what we’ve got to expect, you know—I passed all the stuff along as I got it. Everything, that is, except that a ‘zwilnik’ is anything or anybody that comes after thionite, and that a ‘trenco’ is anything, animal or vegetable, that lives on the planet. QX, Tregonsee—seven hundred, and I’m holding steady—I hope!”
“Steady enough, but you are too far away for our landing beam to grasp you. Apply a little drive . . . . Shift course to your left and down . . . . more left . . . . up a trifle . . . that’s it . . . . slow down. . . . QX.”
There was a gentle, snubbing shock, and Kinnison again translated to his companions the stranger’s thoughts:
“We have you. Cut off all power and lock all controls in neutral. Do nothing more until I instruct you to come out.”
Kinnison obeyed; and, released from all duty, the visitors stared in fascinated incredulity into the visiplate. For that at which they stared was and must forever remain impossible of duplication upon Earth, and only in imagination can it be even faintly pictured. Imagine all the fantastic and monstrous creatures of a delirium-tremens vision incarnate and actual. Imagine them being hurled through the air, borne by a dust-laden gale more severe than any the great American dust-bowl or Africa’s Sahara Desert ever endured. Imagine this scene as being viewed, not in an ordinary, solid distorting mirror, but in one whose falsely reflecting contours were changing constantly, with no logical or intelligible rhythm, into new and ever more grotesque warps. If imagination has been equal to the task, the resultant is what the visitors tried to see.
At first they could make nothing whatever of it. Upon nearer approach, however, the ghastly distortion grew less and the flatly level expanse took on a semblance of rigidity. Directly beneath them they made out something that looked like an immense, flat blister upon the otherwise featureless terrain. Toward this blister their ship was drawn.
A port opened, dwarfed in apparent size to a mere window by the immensity of the structure one of whose entrances it was. Through this port the vast bulk of the space-ship was wafted upon the landing-bars, and behind it the mighty bronze-and-steel gates clanged shut. The lock was pumped to a vacuum, there was a hiss of entering air, a spray of vaporous liquid bathed every inch of the vessel’s surface, and Kinnison felt again the calm thought of Tregonsee, the Rigellian Lensman:
“You may now open your air-lock and emerge. If I have read aright our atmosphere is sufficiently like your own in oxygen content so that you will suffer no ill effects from it. It may be well, however, to wear your armor until you have become accustomed to its considerably greater density.”
“That’ll be a relief!” growled vanBuskirk’s deep bass, when his chief had transmitted the thought. “I’ve been breathing this thin stuff so long I’m getting light-headed.”
“That’s gratitude!” Thorndyke retorted. “We’ve been running our air so heavy that all the rest of us are thick-headed now. If the air in this space-port is any heavier than what we’ve been having, I’m going to wear armor as long as we stay here!”
Kinnison opened the air-lock, found the atmosphere of the space-port satisfactory, and stepped out; to be greeted cordially by Tregonsee the Lensman.
This—this apparition was at least erect, which was something. His body was the size and shape of an oil-drum. Beneath this massive cylinder of a body were four short, blocky legs upon which he waddled about with surprising speed. Midway up the body, above each leg, there sprouted out a ten-foot-long, writhing, boneless, tentacular arm, which toward the extremity branched out into dozens of lesser tentacles, ranging in size from hair-like tendrils up to mighty fingers two inches or more in diameter. Tregonsee’s head was merely a neckless, immobile, bulging dome in the center of the flat upper surface of his body—a dome bearing neither eyes nor ears, but only four equally-spaced toothless mouths and four single, flaring nostrils.
But Kinnison felt no qualm of repugnance at Tregonsee’s monstrous appearance, for embedded in the leathery flesh of one arm was the Lens. Here, the Lensman knew, was in every essential a MAN—and probably a super-man.
“Welcome to Trenco, Kinnison of Tellus,” Tregonsee was saying. “While we are near neighbors in space, I have never happened to visit your planet. I have encountered Tellurians here, of course, but they were not of a type to be received as guests.”
“No, a zwilnik is not a high type of Tellurian,” Kinnison agreed. “I have often wished that I could have your sense of perception, if only for a day. It must be wonderful indeed to be able to perceive a thing as a whole, inside and out, instead of having vision stopped at its surface, as is ours. And to be independent of light or darkness, never to be lost or in need of instruments; to know definitely where you are in relation to every other object or thing around you—that, I think, is the most marvelous sense in the Universe.”
“Just as I have wished for sight and hearing, those two remarkable and to us entirely unexplainable senses. I have dreamed, I have studied volumes, on color and sound. Color in art and in nature; sound in music and in the voices of loved ones; but they remain meaningless symbols upon a printed page. However, such thoughts are vain. In all probability neither of us would enjoy the other’s equipment if he had it, and this interchange is of no material assistance to you.”
In flashing thoughts Kinnison then communicated to the other Lensman everything that had transpired since he left Prime Base.
“I perceive that your Bergenholm is of standard fourteen rating,” Tregonsee said, as the Tellurian finished his story. “We have several spares here; and, while they all have regulation Patrol mountings, it would take much less time to change mounts than to overhaul your machine.”
“That’s so, too—I never thought of the possibility of your having spares on hand—and we’ve lost a lot of time already. How long will it take?”
“One shift of labor to change mounts; at least eight to rebuild yours enough to be sure that it will get you home.”
“We’ll change mounts, then, by all means. I’ll call the boys . . . .”
“There is no need of that. We are amply equipped, and neither you humans nor the Velantians could handle our tools.” Tregonsee made no visible motion nor could Kinnison perceive a break in his thought, but while he was conversing with the Tellurian half a dozen of his blocky Rigellians had dropped whatever they had been doing and were scuttling toward the visiting ship. “Now I must leave you for a time, as I have one more trip to make this afternoon.”
“Is there anything I can do to help