Second Stage Lensmen (Unabridged). E. E. Smith

you called me a . a zwilnik, and they always kill them,” she protested.

      “Not always. In battles and in raids, yes. Captured ones are tried in court. If found guilty, they used to go into the lethal chambers. Sometimes they do yet, but not usually. We have mental therapists now who can operate on a mind if there’s anything there worth saving.”

      “And you think that I will wait to stand trial, in the entirely negligible hope that your bewhiskered, fossilized therapists will find something in me worth saving?”

      “You won’t have to,” Kinnison laughed. “Your case has already been decided—in your favor. I am neither a policeman nor a Narcotics man; but I happen to be qualified as judge, jury, and executioner. I am a therapist to boot. I once saved a worse zwilnik than you are, even though she wasn’t such a knockout. Now do we eat?”

      “Really? You aren’t just . just giving me the needle?”

      The Lensman flipped off her screen and gave her unmistakable evidence. The girl, hitherto so unmovedly self-reliant, broke down. She recovered quickly, however, and in Kinnison’s cabin she ate ravenously.

      “Have you a cigarette?” She sighed with repletion when she could hold no more food.

      “Sure. Alsakanite, Venerian, Tellurian, most anything—we carry a couple of hundred different brands. What would you like?”

      “Tellurian, by all means. I had a package of Camerfields once—they were gorgeous. Would you have those, by any chance?”

      “Uh-huh,” he assured her. “Quartermaster! Carton of Camerfields, please.” It popped out of the pneumatic tube in seconds. “Here you are sister.”

      The glittery girl drew the fragrant smoke deep down into her lungs.

      “Ah, that tastes good! Thanks, Kinnison—for everything. I’m glad you kidded me into eating; that was the finest meal I ever ate. But it won’t take, really. I’ve never broken yet, and I won’t break now. If I do, I won’t be worth a damn, to myself or to anybody else, from then on.” She crushed out the butt. “So let’s get on with the third degree. Bring on your rubber hose and your lights and your drip-can.”

      “You’re still on the wrong foot, Toots,” Kinnison said, pityingly. What a frightful contrast there was between her slimly rounded body, in its fantastically gorgeous costume, and the stark somberness of her eyes! “There’ll be no third degree, no hose, no lights, nothing like that. In fact, I’m not even going to talk to you until you’ve had a good long sleep. You don’t look hungry any more, but you’re still not in tune, by seven thousand kilocycles. How long has it been since you really slept?”

      “A couple of weeks, at a guess. Maybe a month.”

      “Thought so. Come on; you’re going to sleep now.”

      The girl did not move. “With whom?” she asked, quietly. Her voice did not quiver, but stark terror lay in her mind and her hand crept unconsciously toward the hilt of her dagger.

      “Holy Klono’s claws!” Kinnison snorted, staring at her in wide-eyed wonder. “Just what kind of a bunch of hyenas do you think you’ve got into, anyway?”

      “Bad,” the girl replied, gravely. “Not the worst possible, perhaps, but from my standpoint plenty bad enough. What can I expect from the Patrol except what I do expect? You don’t need to kid me along, Kinnison. I can take it, and I’d a lot rather take it standing up, facing it, than have you sneak up on me with it after giving me your shots in the arm.”

      “What somebody has done to you is a sin and a shrieking shame,” Kinnison declared, feelingly. “Come on, you poor little devil.” He picked up sundry pieces of apparatus, then, taking her arm, he escorted her to another, almost luxuriously furnished cabin.

      “That door,” he explained carefully, “is solid chrome-tungsten-molybdenum steel. The lock can’t be picked. There are only two keys to it in existence, and here they are. There’s a bolt, too, that’s proof against anything short of a five-hundred-ton hydraulic jack, or an atomic-hydrogen cutting torch. Here’s a full-coverage screen, and a twenty-foot spy-ray block. There is your stuff out of the speedster. If you want help, or anything to eat or drink, or anything else that can be expected aboard a ship like this, there’s the communicator. QX?”

      “Then you really mean it? That I . that you . I mean .”

      “Absolutely,” he assured her. “Just that. You are completely the master of your destiny, the captain of your soul. Good-night.”

      “Good-night, Kinnison. Good-night, and th . thanks.” The girl threw herself face downward upon the bed in a storm of sobs.

      Nevertheless, as Kinnison started back toward his own cabin, he heard the massive bolt click into its socket and felt the blocking screens go on.