First Lensman, E. E. Smith [top 100 novels of all time .txt] 📗

level after level of sub-basement. The screen brightened; a keen young face appeared.

“Good evening, Jim. Will you please send my car up to the Wright Skyway feeder?”

“At once, sir. It will be there in seventy five seconds.”

Samms cut off; and, after a brief exchange of thought with Kinnison, went out into the hall and along it to the “down” shaft. There, going free, he stepped through a doorless, unguarded archway into over a thousand feet of air. Although it was long after conventional office hours the shaft was still fairly busy, but that made no difference⁠—inertialess collisions cannot even be felt. He bulleted downward to the sixth floor, where he brought himself to an instantaneous halt.

Leaving the shaft, he joined the now thinning crowd hurrying toward the exit. A girl with meticulously plucked eyebrows and an astounding hairdo, catching sight of his Lens, took her hands out of her breeches pockets⁠—skirts went out, as office dress, when up-and-down open-shaft velocities of a hundred or so miles per hour replaced elevators⁠—nudged her companion, and whispered excitedly:

“Look there! Quick! I never saw one close up before, did you? That’s him⁠—himself! First Lensman Samms!”

At the Portal, the Lensman as a matter of habit held out his car-check, but such formalities were no longer necessary, or even possible. Everybody knew, or wanted to be thought of as knowing, Virgil Samms.

“Stall four sixty five, First Lensman, sir,” the uniformed gateman told him, without even glancing at the extended disk.

“Thank you, Tom.”

“This way, please, sir, First Lensman,” and a youth, teeth gleaming white in a startlingly black face, strode proudly to the indicated stall and opened the vehicle’s door.

“Thank you, Danny,” Samms said, as appreciatively as though he did not know exactly where his ground-car was.

He got in. The door jammed itself gently shut. The runabout⁠—a Dillingham eleven-forty⁠—shot smoothly forward upon its two fat, soft tires. Halfway to the exit archway he was doing forty; he hit the steeply-banked curve leading into the lofty “street” at ninety. Nor was there shock or strain. Motorcycle-wise, but automatically, the “Dilly” leaned against its gyroscopes at precisely the correct angle; the huge low-pressure tires clung to the resilient synthetic of the pavement as though integral with it. Nor was there any question of conflicting traffic, for this thoroughfare, six full levels above Varick Street proper, was not, strictly speaking, a street at all. It had only one point of access, the one which Samms had used; and only one exit⁠—it was simply and only a feeder into Wright Skyway, a limited-access superhighway.

Samms saw, without noting particularly, the maze of traffic-ways of which this feeder was only one tiny part; a maze which extended from ground-level up to a point well above even the towering buildings of New York’s metropolitan district.

The way rose sharply; Samms’ right foot went down a little farther; the Dillingham began to pick up speed. Moving loudspeakers sang to him and yelled and blared at him, but he did not hear them. Brilliant signs, flashing and flaring all the colors of the spectrum⁠—sheer triumphs of the electrician’s art⁠—blazed in or flamed into arresting words and eye-catching pictures, but he did not see them. Advertising⁠—designed by experts to sell everything from aardvarks to Martian zyzmol (“bottled ecstacy”)⁠—but the First Lensman was a seasoned big-city dweller. His mind had long since become a perfect filter, admitting to his consciousness only things which he wanted to perceive: only so can big-city life be made endurable.

Approaching the Skyway, he cut in his touring roadlights, slowed down a trifle, and insinuated his low-flyer into the stream of traffic. Those lights threw fifteen hundred watts apiece, but there was no glare⁠—polarized lenses and windshields saw to that.

He wormed his way over to the left-hand, high-speed lane and opened up. At the edge of the skyscraper district, where Wright Skyway angles sharply downward to ground level, Samms’ attention was caught and held by something off to his right⁠—a blue-white, whistling something that hurtled upward into the air. As it ascended it slowed down; its monotone shriek became lower and lower in pitch; its light went down through the spectrum toward the red. Finally it exploded, with an earthshaking crash; but the lightning-like flash of the detonation, instead of vanishing almost instantaneously, settled itself upon a low-hanging artificial cloud and became a picture and four words⁠—two bearded faces and “Smith Bros. Cough Drops”!

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Samms spoke aloud, chagrined at having been compelled to listen to and to look at an advertisement. “I thought I had seen everything, but that is really new!”

Twenty minutes⁠—fifty miles⁠—later, Samms left the Skyway at a point near what had once been South Norwalk, Connecticut; an area transformed now into the level square miles of New York Spaceport.

New York Spaceport; then, and until the establishment of Prime Base, the biggest and busiest field in existence upon any planet of Civilization. For New York City, long the financial and commercial capital of the Earth, had maintained the same dominant position in the affairs of the Solar System and was holding a substantial lead over her rivals, Chicago, London, and Stalingrad, in the race for interstellar supremacy.

And Virgil Samms himself, because of the ever-increasing menace of piracy, had been largely responsible for the policy of basing the war-vessels of the Triplanetary Patrol upon each space-field in direct ratio to the size and importance of that field. Hence he was no stranger in New York Spaceport; in fact, master psychologist that he was, he had made it a point to know by first name practically everyone connected with it.

No sooner had he turned his Dillingham over to a smiling attendant, however, than he was accosted by a man whom he had never seen before.

“Mr. Samms?” the stranger asked.

“Yes.” Samms did not energize his Lens; he had not yet developed either the inclination or the technique to probe instantaneously every entity who approached him, upon any pretext whatever, in order to find out what that entity really wanted.

“I’m Isaacson⁠ ⁠…” the man paused, as