even biologically, it doesn’t make sense. There are no such things as females—there can’t be!” and Kinnison saw her viewpoint clearly enough. According to her sociology and conditioning there could not be.
“We’ll go into that later,” he told her. “What I want now is this female zwilnik. Is she—or it—with your elder relative now?”
“Yes. They will be having dinner in the hall very shortly.”
“Sorry to bother, but you’ll have to take me to them—right now.”
“Oh, may I? Since I could not kill you myself, I must take you to them so they can do it. I have been wondering how I could force you to go there,” she explained, naively.
“Henderson?” The Lensman spoke into his microphone—thought-screens, of course, being no barrier to radio waves. “I’m going after the zwilnik. This woman here is taking me. Have the ’copter stay over me, ready to needle anything I tell them to. While I’m gone go over that speeder with a fine-tooth comb, and when you get everything we want, blast it. It and the Dauntless are the only spacecraft on the planet. These janes are man-haters and mental killers, so keep your thought-screens up. Don’t let them down for a fraction of a second, because they’ve got plenty of jets and they’re just as sweet and reasonable as a cageful of cateagles. Got it?”
“On the tape, chief,” came instant answer. “But don’t take any chances, Kim. Sure you can swing it alone?”
“Jets enough and to spare,” Kinnison assured him, curtly. Then, as the Tellurians’ helicopter shot into the air, he again turned his thought to the manager.
“Let’s go,” he directed, and she led him across the way to a row of parked ground-cars. She manipulated a couple of levers and smoothly, if slowly, the little vehicle rolled away.
The distance was long and the pace was slow. The woman was driving automatically, the while her every sense was concentrated upon finding some weak point, some chink in his barrier, through which to thrust at him. Kinnison was amazed—stumped—at her fixity of purpose; at her grimly single-minded determination to make an end of him. She was out to get him, and she wasn’t fooling.
“Listen, sister,” he thought at her, after a few minutes of it; almost plaintively, for him. “Let’s be reasonable about this thing. I told you I didn’t want to kill you; why in all the iridescent hells of space are you so dead set on killing me? If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll give you a treatment that will make your head ache for the next six months. Why don’t you snap out of it, you dumb little lug, and be friends?”
This thought jarred her so that she stopped the car, the better to stare directly and viciously into his eyes.
“Be friends? With a male?” The thought literally seared its way into the man’s brain.
“Listen, half-wit!” Kinnison stormed, exasperated. “Forget your narrow-minded, one-planet prejudices and think for a minute, if you can think—use that pint of bean soup inside your skull for something besides hating me all over the place. Get this—I am no more a male than you are the kind of a female that you think, by analogy, such a creature would have to be if she could exist in a sane and logical world.”
“Oh.” The Lyranian was taken aback at such cavalier instruction. “But the others, those in your so-immense vessel, they are of a certainty males,” she stated with conviction. “I understood what you told them via your telephone-without-conductors. You have mechanical shields against the thought which kills. Yet you do not have to use it, while the others—males indubitably—do. You yourself are not entirely male; your brain is almost as good as a person’s.”
“Better, you mean,” he corrected her. “You’re wrong. All of us of the ship are men—all alike. But a man on a job can’t concentrate all the time on defending his brain against attack, hence the use of thought-screens. I can’t use a screen out here, because I’ve got to talk to you people. See?”
“You fear us, then, so little?” she flared, all of her old animosity blazing out anew. “You consider our power, then, so small a thing?”
“Right. Right to a hair,” he declared, with tightening jaw. But he did not believe it—quite. This girl was just about as safe to play around with as five-feet-eleven of coiled bushmaster, and twice as deadly.
She could not kill him mentally. Nor could the elder sister—whoever she might be—and her crew; he was pretty sure of that. But if they couldn’t do him in by dint of brain it was a foregone conclusion that they would try brawn. And brawn they certainly had. This jade beside him weighed a hundred sixty five or seventy, and she was trained down fine. Hard, limber, and fast. He might be able to lick three or four of them—maybe half a dozen—in a rough-and-tumble brawl; but more than that would mean either killing or being killed. Damn it all! He’d never killed a woman yet, but it looked as though he might have to start in pretty quick now.
“Well, let’s get going again,” he suggested, “and while we’re en route let’s see if we can’t work out some basis of cooperation—a sort of live-and-let-live arrangement. Since you understood the orders I gave the crew, you realize that our ship carries weapons capable of razing this entire city in a space of minutes.” It was a statement, not a question.
“I realize that.” The thought was muffled in helpless fury. “Weapons, weapons—always weapons! The eternal male! If it were not for your huge vessel and the peculiar airplane hovering over us I would claw your eyes out and strangle you with my bare hands!”
“That would be a good trick if you could do it,” he countered, equably enough. “But listen, you frustrated young murderess. You have already shown yourself to be, basically, a realist in facing physical facts. Why not face mental, intellectual facts in the same spirit?”
“Why, I do, of course. I always do!”
“You do not,” he contradicted, sharply. “Males, according to your lights, have two—and only two—attributes. One, they breed. Two, they fight. They fight each other, and everything else, to the death and at the drop of a hat. Right?”
“Right, but .”
“But nothing—let me talk. Why didn’t you breed the combativeness out of your males, hundreds of generations ago?”
“They tried it once, but the race began to deteriorate,” she admitted.
“Exactly. Your whole set-up is cock-eyed—unbalanced. You can think of me only as a male—one to be destroyed on sight, since I am not like one of yours. Yet, when I could kill you and had every reason to do so, I didn’t. We can destroy you all, but we won’t unless we must. What’s the answer?”
“I don’t know,” she confessed, frankly. Her frenzied desire for killing abated, although her ingrained antipathy and revulsion did not. “In some ways, you do seem to have some of the instincts and qualities of a . almost of a person.”
“I am a person .”
“You are not! Do you think that I am to be misled by the silly coverings you wear?”
“Just a minute. I am a person of a race having two equal sexes. Equal in every way. Numbers, too—one man and one woman .” and he went on to explain to her, as well as he could, the sociology of Civilization.
“Incredible!” she gasped the thought.
