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

this man. I suppose he is now out in deep space somewhere. Have you any idea where?”

“He is now in his home city, accumulating funds and manufacturing fuel with which to continue his pointless activities. That city is named⁠ ⁠… that is, in your English you might call it⁠ ⁠… Suntown? Sunberg? No, it must be more specific⁠ ⁠… Rigelsville? Rigel City?”

“Rigelston, I would translate it?” Samms hazarded.

“Exactly⁠—Rigelston.” The professor marked its location upon a globular mental map far more accurate and far more detailed than the globe which Captain Winfield and his lieutenant were then studying.

“Thanks. Now, can you and will you get in touch with this explorer and ask him to call a meeting of his full crew and any others who might be interested in the project I have outlined?”

“I can. I will. He and his kind are not quite sane, of course, as you know; but I do not believe that even they are so insane as to be willing to subject themselves to the environment of your vessel.”

“They will not be asked to come here. The meeting will be held in Rigelston. If necessary, I shall insist that it be held there.”

“You would? I perceive that you would. It is strange⁠ ⁠… yes, fantastic⁠ ⁠… you are quarrelsome, pugnacious, antisocial, vicious, small-bodied and small-brained; timid, nervous, and highly and senselessly excitable; unbalanced and unsane; as sheerly monstrous mentally as you are physically.⁠ ⁠…” These outrageous thoughts were sent as casually and as impersonally as though the sender were discussing the weather. He paused, then went on: “And yet, to further such a completely visionary project, you are eager to subject yourself to conditions whose counterparts I could not force myself, under any circumstances whatever, to meet. It may be⁠ ⁠… it must be true that there is an extension of the principle of working together for the common good which my mind, for lack of pertinent data, has not been able to grasp. I am now en rapport with Dronvire the explorer.”

“Ask him, please, not to identify himself to me. I do not want to go into that meeting with any preconceived ideas.”

“A balanced thought,” the Rigellian approved. “Someone will be at the airport to point out to you the already desolated area in which the spaceship of the explorers makes its so-frightful landings; Dronvire will ask someone to meet you at the airport and bring you to the place of meeting.”

The telepathic line snapped and Samms turned a white and sweating face to the Chicago’s captain.

“God, what a strain! Don’t ever try telepathy unless you positively have to⁠—especially not with such an outlandishly different race as these Rigellians are!”

“Don’t worry; I won’t.” Winfield’s words were not at all sympathetic, but his tone was. “You looked as though somebody was beating your brains out with a spiked club. Where next, First Lensman?”

Samms marked the location of Rigelston upon the vessel’s chart, then donned earplugs and a special, radiation-proof suit of armor, equipped with refrigerators and with extra-thick blocks of lead glass to protect the eyes.

The airport, an extremely busy one well outside the city proper, was located easily enough, as was the spot upon which the Tellurian ship was to land. Lightly, slowly, she settled downward, her jets raving out against a gravity fully twice that of her native Earth. Those blasts, however, added little or nothing to the destruction already accomplished by the craft then lying there⁠—a torpedo-shaped cruiser having perhaps one-twentieth of the Chicago’s mass and bulk.

The superdreadnaught landed, sinking into the hard, dry ground to a depth of some ten or fifteen feet before she stopped. Samms, en rapport with the entity who was to be his escort, made a flashing survey of the mind so intimately in contact with his own. No use. This one was not and never could become Lensman material. He climbed heavily down the ladder. This double-normal gravity made the going a bit difficult, but he could stand that a lot better than some of the other things he was going to have to take. The Rigellian equivalent of an automobile was there, waiting for him, its door invitingly open.

Samms had known⁠—in general⁠—what to expect. The two-wheeled chassis was more or less similar to that of his own Dillingham. The body was a narrow torpedo of steel, bluntly pointed at both ends, and without windows. Two features, however, were both unexpected and unpleasant⁠—the hard, tough steel of which that body was forged was an inch and a half thick, instead of one-sixteenth; and even that extraordinarily armored body was dented and scarred and marred, especially about the fore and rear quarters, as deeply and as badly and as casually as are the fenders of an Earthly jalopy!

The Lensman climbed, not easily or joyously, into that grimly forbidding black interior. Black? It was so black that the porthole-like doorway seemed to admit no light at all. It was blacker than a witch’s cat in a coal cellar at midnight! Samms flinched; then, stiffening, thought at the driver.

“My contact with you seems to have slipped. I’m afraid that I will have to cling to you rather more tightly than may be either polite or comfortable. Deprived of sight, and without your sense of perception, I am practically helpless.”

“Come in, Lensman, by all means. I offered to maintain full engagement, but it seemed to me that you declined it; quite possibly the misunderstanding was due to our unfamiliarity with each others’ customary mode of thought. Relax, please, and come in⁠ ⁠… there! Better?”

“Infinitely better. Thanks.”

And it was. The darkness vanished; through the unexplainable perceptive sense of the Rigellian he could “see” everything⁠—he had a practically perfect three-dimensional view of the entire circumambient sphere. He could see both the inside and the outside of the ground car he was in and of the immense spaceship in which he had come to Rigel IV. He could see the bearings and the wrist-pins of the internal-combustion engine of the car, the interior structure of the welds that held