First Lensman, E. E. Smith [early readers TXT] 📗

name you have given it. What does a Chief Dexitroboper do?"

"She—or he—or, perhaps, it ... is a supervisor of the work of dexitroboping." The thought, while perfectly clear, was completely meaningless to Samms, and the Palainian knew it. She tried again. "Dexitroboping has to do with ... nourishment? No—with nutrients."

"Ah. Farming—agriculture," Samms thought; but this time it was the Palainian who could not grasp the concept. "Hunting? Fishing?" No better. "Show me, then, please."

She tried; but demonstration, too, was useless; for to Samms the Palainian's movements were pointless indeed. The peculiarly flowing subtly changing thing darted back and forth, rose and fell, appeared and disappeared; undergoing the while cyclic changes in shape and form and size, in aspect and texture. It was now spiny, now tentacular, now scaly, now covered with peculiarly repellent feather-like fronds, each oozing a crimson slime. But it apparently did not do anything whatever. The net result of all its activity was, apparently, zero.

"There, it is done." Pilinipsi's thought again came clear. "You observed and understood? You did not. That is strange—baffling. Since the Lens did improve communication and understanding tremendously, I hoped that it might extend to the physical as well. But there must be some basic, fundamental difference, the nature of which is at present obscure. I wonder ... if I had a Lens, too—but no...."

"But yes!" Samms broke in, eagerly. "Why don't you go to Arisia and be tested for one? You have a magnificent, a really tremendous mind. It is of Lensman grade in every respect except one—you simply don't want to use it!"

"Me? Go to Arisia?" The thought would have been, in a Tellurian, a laugh of scorn. "How utterly silly—how abysmally stupid! There would be personal discomfort, quite possibly personal danger, and two Lenses would be little or no better than one in resolving differences between our two continua, which are probably in fact incommensurable."

"Well, then," Samms thought, almost viciously, "can you introduce me to someone who is stupider, sillier, and more foolish than you are?"

"Not here on Pluto, no." The Palainian took no offense. "That was why it was I who interviewed the earlier Tellurian visitors and why I am now conversing with you. The others avoided you."

"I see." Samms' thought was grim. "How about the home planet, then?"

"Ah. Undoubtedly. In fact, there is a group, a club, of such persons. None of them is, of course, as insane—as aberrant—as you are, but they are all much more so than I am."

"Who of this club would be most interested in becoming a Lensman?"

"Tallick was the least stable member of the New-Thought Club when I left Seven; Kragzex a close second. There may of course have been changes since then. But I cannot believe that even Tallick—even Tallick at his outrageous worst—would be crazy enough to join your Patrol."

"Nevertheless, I must see him myself. Can you and will you give me a chart of a routing from here to Palain Seven?"

"I can and I will. Nothing you have thought will be of any use to me; that will be the easiest and quickest way of getting rid of you." The Palainian spread a completely detailed chart in Samms' mind, snapped the telepathic line, and went unconcernedly about her incomprehensible business.

Samms, mind reeling, made his way back to his boat and took off. And as the light-years and the parsecs screamed past, he sank deeper and deeper into a welter of unproductive speculation. What were—really—those Palainians? How could they—really—exist as they seemed to exist? And why had some of that dexitroboper's—whatever that meant!—thoughts come in so beautifully sharp and clear and plain while others...?

He knew that his Lens would receive and would convert into his own symbology any thought or message, however coded or garbled or however sent or transmitted. The Lens was not at fault; his symbology was. There were concepts—things—actualities—occurrences—so foreign to Tellurian experience that no referents existed. Hence the human mind lacked the channels, the mechanisms, to grasp them.

He and Roderick Kinnison had glibly discussed the possibility of encountering forms of intelligent life so alien that humanity would have no point whatever of contact with them. After what Samms had just gone through, that was more of a possibility than either he or his friend had believed; and he hoped grimly, as he considered how seriously this partial contact with the Palainian had upset him, that the possibility would never become a fact.

He found the Palainian system easily enough, and Palain Seven. That planet, of course, was almost as dark upon its sunward side as upon the other, and its inhabitants had no use for light. Pilinipsi's instructions, however, had been minute and exact; hence Samms had very little trouble in locating the principal city—or, rather, the principal village, since there were no real cities. He found the planet's one spaceport. What a thing to call a port! He checked back; recalled exactly this part of his interview with Pluto's Chief Dexitroboper.

"The place upon which space-ships land," had been her thought, when she showed him exactly where it was in relationship to the town. Just that, and nothing else. It had been his mind, not hers, that had supplied the docks and cradles, the service cars, the officers, and all the other things taken for granted in space-fields everywhere as Samms knew them. Either the Palainian had not perceived the trappings with which Samms had invested her visualization, or she had not cared enough about his misapprehension to go to the trouble of correcting it; he did not know which.

The whole area was as bare as his hand. Except for the pitted, scarred, slagged-down spots which showed so clearly what driving blasts would do to such inconceivably cold rock and metal, Palainport was in no way distinguishable from any other unimproved portion of the planet's utterly bleak surface.

There were no signals; he had been told of no landing conventions. Apparently it was everyone for himself. Wherefore Samms' tremendous landing lights blazed out, and with their aid he came safely to ground. He put on his armour and strode to the air-lock; then changed his mind and went to the cargo-port instead. He had intended to walk, but in view of the rugged and deserted field and the completely unknown terrain between the field and the town, he decided to ride the "creep" instead.

This vehicle, while slow, could go—literally—anywhere. It had a cigar-shaped body of magnalloy; it had big, soft, tough tires; it had cleated tracks; it had air- and water-propellers; it had folding wings; it had driving, braking, and steering jets. It could traverse the deserts of Mars, the oceans and swamps of Venus, the crevassed glaciers of Earth, the jagged, frigid surface of an iron asteroid, and the cratered, fluffy topography of the moon; if not with equal speed, at least with equal safety.

Samms released the thing and drove it into the cargo lock, noting mentally that he would have to exhaust the air of that lock into space before he again broke the inner seal. The ramp slid back into the ship; the cargo port closed. Here he was!

Should he use his headlights, or not? He did not know the Palainians' reaction to or attitude toward light. It had not occurred to him while at Pluto to ask, and it might be important. The landing lights of his vessel might already have done his cause irreparable harm. He could drive by starlight if he had to ... but he needed light and he had not seen a single living or moving thing. There was no evidence that there was a Palainian within miles. While he had known, with his brain, that Palain would be dark, he had expected to find buildings and traffic—ground-cars, planes, and at least a few space-ships—and not this vast nothingness.

If nothing else, there must be a road from Palain's principal city to its only spaceport; but Samms had not seen it from his vessel and he could not see it now. At least, he could not recognize it. Wherefore he clutched in the tractor drive and took off in a straight line toward town. The going was more than rough—it was really rugged—but the creep was built to stand up under punishment and its pilot's chair was sprung and cushioned to exactly the same degree. Hence, while the course itself was infinitely worse than the smoothly paved approaches to Rigelston, Samms found this trip much less bruising than the other had been.

Approaching the village, he dimmed his roadlights and slowed down. At its edge he cut them entirely and inched his way forward by starlight alone.

What a town! Virgil Samms had seen the inhabited places of almost every planet of Civilization. He had seen cities laid out in circles, sectors, ellipses, triangles, squares, parallelopipeds—practically every plan known to geometry. He had seen structures of all shapes and sizes—narrow skyscrapers, vast-spreading one-stories, polyhedra, domes, spheres, semi-cylinders, and erect and inverted full and truncated cones and pyramids. Whatever the plan or the shapes of the component units, however, those inhabited places had, without exception, been understandable. But this!

Samms, his eyes now completely dark-accustomed, could see fairly well, but the more he saw the less he grasped. There was no plan, no coherence or unity whatever. It was as though a cosmic hand had flung a few hundreds of buildings, of incredibly and senselessly varied shapes and sizes and architectures, upon an otherwise empty plain, and as though each structure had been allowed ever since to remain in whatever location and attitude it had chanced to fall. Here and there were jumbled piles of three or more utterly incongruous structures. There were a few whose arrangement was almost orderly. Here and there were large, irregularly-shaped areas of bare, untouched ground. There were no streets—at least, nothing that the man could recognize as such.

Samms headed the creep for one of those open areas, then stopped—declutched the tracks, set the brakes, and killed the engines.

"Go slow, fellow," he advised himself then. "Until you find out what a dexitroboper actually does while working at his trade, don't take chances of interfering or of doing damage!"

No Lensman knew—then—that frigid-blooded poison-breathers were not strictly three-dimensional; but Samms did know that he had actually seen things which he could not understand. He and Kinnison had discussed such occurrences calmly enough; but the actuality was enough to shake even the mind of Civilization's First Lensman.

He did not need to be any closer, anyway. He had learned the Palainians' patterns well enough to Lens them from a vastly greater distance than his present one; this personal visit to Palainopolis had been a gesture of friendliness, not a necessity.

"Tallick? Kragzex?" He sent out the questing, querying thought. "Lensman Virgil Samms of Sol Three calling Tallick and Kragzex of Palain Seven."

"Kragzex acknowledging, Virgil Samms," a thought snapped back, as diamond-clear, as precise, as Pilinipsi's had been.

"Is Tallick here, or anywhere on the planet?"

"He is here, but he is emmfozing at the moment. He will join us presently."

Damnation! There it was again! First "dexitroboping", and now this!

"One moment, please," Samms requested. "I fail to grasp the meaning of your thought."

"So I perceive. The fault is of course mine, in not being able to attune my mind fully to yours. Do not take this, please, as any aspersion upon the character or strength of your own mind."

"Of course not. I am the first Tellurian you have met?"

"Yes."

"I have exchanged thoughts with one other Palainian, and the same difficulty existed. I can neither understand nor explain it; but it is as though there are differences between us so fundamental that in some matters mutual comprehension is in fact impossible."

"A masterly summation and undoubtedly a true one. This emmfozing, then—if I read correctly, your race has only two sexes?"

"You read correctly."

"I cannot understand. There is no close analogy. However, emmfozing has to do with reproduction."

"I see," and Samms saw, not only a frankness brand-new to his experience, but also a new view of both the powers and the limitations of his Lens.

It was, by its very nature, of precisionist grade. It received thoughts and translated them precisely into English. There was some leeway, but not much. If any thought was such that there was no extremely close counterpart or referent in English, the Lens would not translate it at all, but would simply give it a hitherto meaningless symbol—a symbol which would from that time on be associated, by all Lenses everywhere, with that one concept and no other. Samms realized then that he might, some day, learn what a dexitroboper actually did and what the act of emmfozing actually was; but that he very probably would not.

Tallick joined them then, and Samms again described glowingly, as he had done so many times before, the Galactic Patrol of his imaginings and plannings. Kragzex refused to have anything to do with such a thing, almost as abruptly as Pilinipsi had done, but Tallick lingered—and wavered.

"It is widely known that I am not entirely sane," he admitted, "which may