The Greatest Works of E. E. Smith. E. E. Smith

of course, but they are mostly superficial—none that will not yield quite readily to treatment.”

      “Mighty glad of that. He’ll be here six weeks, then?”

      “Better call it twelve, I think—ten at least. You see, some of the fractures, especially those in the left leg, and a couple of burns, are rather severe, as such things go. Then, too, the length of time elapsing between injury and treatment didn’t do anything a bit of good.”

      “In two weeks he’ll be wanting to get up and go places and do things; and in six he’ll be tearing down your hospital, stone by stone.”

      “Yes.” The surgeon smiled. “He isn’t the type to make an ideal patient; but, as I have told you before, I like to have patients that we do not like.”

      “And another thing. I want the files on his nurses, particularly the red-headed one.”

      “I suspected that you would, so I had them sent down. Here you are. Glad you noticed MacDougall—she’s by way of being my favorite. Clarrissa MacDougall—Scotch, of course, with that name—twenty years old. Height, five feet six; weight, one forty-five and a half. Here are her pictures, conventional and X-ray. Man, look at that skeleton! Beautiful! The only really perfect skeleton I ever saw in a woman . . . .”

      “It isn’t the skeleton I’m interested in,” grunted Haynes. “It’s what is outside the skeleton that my Lensman will be looking at.”

      “You needn’t worry about MacDougall,” declared the surgeon. “One good look at that picture will tell you that. She classifies—with that skeleton she has to. She couldn’t leave the beam a millimeter, even if she wanted to. Good, bad, or indifferent; male or female; physical, mental, moral, and psychological; the skeleton tells the whole story.”

      “Maybe it does to you, but not to me,” and Haynes took up the “conventional” photograph a stereoscope in full, true color; an almost-living duplicate of the girl in question. Her thick, heavy hair was not red, but was a vividly intense and brilliant auburn; a coppery bronze, flashed with red and gold. Her eyes . . . . bronze was all that he could think of, with flecks of topaz and of tawny gold. Her skin, too, was faintly bronze, glowing with even more than healthy youth’s normal measure of sparkling vitality. Not only was she beautiful, the Port Admiral decided; in the words of the surgeon, she “classified.”

      “Hm . . . . m. Dimples, too,” Haynes muttered. “Worse even than I thought—she’s a menace to civilization,” and he went on to read the documents. “Family . . . . hm. History . . . . experiences . . . reactions and characteristics . . . . behavior patterns . . . . psychology . . . . mentality . . . .”

      “She’ll do, Lacy,” he advised the surgeon finally. “Keep her on with him . . . .”

      “Do!” Lacy snorted. “It isn’t a question of whether she rates. Look at that hair—those eyes. Pure Samms. A man to match her would have to be one in a hundred thousand million. With that skeleton, though, he is.”

      “Of course he is. You don’t seem to realize, you myopic old appendix-snatcher, that he’s pure Kinnison!”

      “Ah . . . so maybe we could . . . . but he won’t be falling for anybody yet, since he’s just been unattached. He’ll be bullet-proof for quite a while. You ought to know that young Lensmen—especially young Gray Lensmen—can’t see anything but their jobs; for a couple of years, anyway.”

      “His skeleton tells you that, too, huh?” Haynes grunted, skeptically. “Ordinarily, yes; but you never can tell, especially in hospitals . . . .”

      “More of your layman’s misinformation!” Lacy snapped. “Contrary to popular belief, romance does not thrive in hospitals; except, of course, among the staff. Patients oftentimes think that they fall in love with nurses, but it takes two people to make one romance. Nurses do not fall in love with patients, because a man is never at his best under hospitalization. In fact, the better a man is, the poorer a showing he is apt to make.”

      “And, as I forget who said, a long time ago, ‘no generalization is true, not even this one’,” retorted the Port Admiral. “When it does hit him it will hit hard, and we’ll take no chances. How about the black-haired one?”

      “Well, I just told you that MacDougall has the only perfect skeleton I ever saw in a woman. Brownlee is very good, too, of course, but .”

      “But not good enough to rate Lensman’s Mate, eh?” Haynes completed the thought. “Then take her out. Pick the best skeletons you’ve got for this job, and see that no others come anywhere near him. Transfer them to some other hospital—to some other floor of this one, at least. Any woman that he ever falls for will fall for him, in spite of your ideas as to the one-wayness of hospital romance; and I don’t want him to have such a good chance of making a dive at something that doesn’t rate up. Am I right or wrong, and for how much?”

      “Well, I haven’t had time yet to really study his skeleton, but .”

      “Better take a week off and study it. I’ve studied a lot of people in the last sixty-five years, and I’ll match my experience against your knowledge of bones, any time. Not saying that he will fall this trip, you understand—just playing safe.”

      CHAPTER 18

      Advanced Training

       Table of Contents

      Kinnison came to—or, rather, to say that he came half-to would be a more accurate statement—with a yell directed at the blurrily-seen figure in white which he knew must be a nurse.

      “Nurse!” Then, as a searing stab of pain shot through him at the effort, he went on, thinking at the figure in white through his Lens:

      “My speedster! I must have landed her free! Get the space-port .”

      “There, there, Lensman,” a low, rich voice crooned, and a red-head bent over him. “The speedster has been taken care of. Everything is on the green; go to sleep and rest.”

      “Never mind your ship,” the unctuous voice went on. “It was landed and put away .”

      “Listen, dumb-bell!” snapped the patient, speaking aloud now, in spite of the pain, the better to drive home his meaning. “Don’t try to soothe me! What do you think I am, delirious? Get this and get it straight. I said I landed that speedster free. If you don’t know what that means, tell somebody that does. Get the space-port—get Haynes—get .”

      “We got them, Lensman, long ago.” Although her voice was still creamily, sweetly soft, an angry color burned into the nurse’s face. “I said everything is on zero. Your speedster was inerted; how else could you be here, inert? I helped do it myself, so I know she’s inert.”

      “QX.” The patient relapsed instantly into unconsciousness and the nurse turned to an intern standing by—wherever that nurse was, at least one doctor could almost always be found.

      “But my ship .”

      “Dumb-bell!” she flared. “What a sweet mess he’s going to be to take care of! Not even conscious yet, and he’s calling names and picking fights already!”

      In a few days Kinnison was fully and alertly conscious. In a week most of the pain had left him, and he was beginning to chafe under restraint. In ten days he was “fit to be tied,” and his acquaintance with his head nurse, so inauspiciously begun, developed even more inauspiciously as time went on. For, as Haynes and Lacy had each more than anticipated, the Lensman was by no means an ideal patient.

      Nothing that could be done would satisfy him. All doctors were fat-heads, even Lacy, the man who had put him together. All nurses were dumb-bells, even—or especially?—“Mac,” who with almost superhuman skill, tact, and patience had been holding him together. Why, even fat-heads and dumb-bells, even high-grade morons, ought to know that a man needed