First Lensman

Chapter 10

PLUTO is, on the average, about forty times as far away from the sun as is Mother Earth. Each square yard of Earth's surface receives about sixteen hundred times as much beat as does each of Pluto's. The sun as seen from Pluto is a dim, wan speck. Even at perihelion, an event which occurs only once in two hundred forty eight Tellurian years, and at noon and on the equator, Pluto is so bitterly cold that climatic conditions upon its surface simply cannot be described by or to warm–blooded, oxygen–breathing man.

As good an indication as any can be given, perhaps, by mentioning the fact that it had taken the Patrol's best engineers over six months to perfect the armor which Virgil Samms then wore. For no ordinary space–suit would do. Space itself is not cold; the only loss of heat is by radiation into or through an almost perfect vacuum. In contact with Pluto's rocky, metallic soil, however, there would be conduction; and the magnitude of the inevitable heat–loss made the Tellurian scientists gasp.

"Watch your feet, Virge!" had been Roderick Kinnison's

insistent last thought. "Remember those psychologists—if they stayed in contact with that ground for five minutes they froze their feet to the ankles. Not that the boys aren't good, but slipsticks sometimes slip in more ways than one. If your feet ever start to get cold, drop whatever you're doing and drive back here at max!"

Virgil Samms landed. His feet stayed warm. Finally, assured that the heaters of his suit could carry the load indefinitely, he made his way on foot into the settlement near which he had come to ground. And there he saw his first Palainian.

Or, strictly speaking, he saw part of his first Palainian; for no three– dimensional creature has ever seen or ever will see in entirety any member of any of the frigidblooded, poison–breathing races. Since life as we know it— organic, three–dimensional life—is based upon liquid water and gaseous oxygen, such life did not and could not develop upon planets whose temperatures are only a few degrees above absolute zero. Many, perhaps most, of these ultra– frigid planets have an atmosphere of sorts; some have no atmosphere at all. Nevertheless, with or without atmosphere and completely without oxygen and water; life—highly intelligent life did develop upon millions and millions of such worlds. That life is not, however, strictly three–dimensional. Of necessity, even in the lowest forms, it possesses an extension into the hyper– dimension; and it is this metabolic extension alone which makes it possible for life to exist under such extreme conditions.

The extension makes it impossible for any human being to see anything of a Palainian except the fluid, amorphous, ever–changing thing which is his three– dimensional aspect of the moment; makes any attempt at description or portraiture completely futile. Virgil Samms stared at the Palainian; tried to see what it looked like. He could not tell whether it had eyes or antennae; legs, arms, or tentacles, teeth or beaks, talons or claws or feet; skin, scales, or feathers. It did not even remotely resemble anything that the Lensman had ever seen, sensed, or imagined. He gave up; sent out an exploring thought.

"I am Virgil Samms, a Tellurian," he sent out slowly, carefully, after he made contact with the outer fringes of the creature's mind, "Is it possible for you, sir or madam, to give me a moment of your time?"

"Eminently possible, Lensman Samms, since my time is of completely negligible value." The monster's mind flashed into accord with Samms' with a speed and precision that made him gasp. That is, a part of it became en rapport with a part of his: years were to pass before even the First Lensman would know much more about the Palainian than he learned in that first contact; no human beings except the Children of the Lens ever were to understand even dimly the labyrinthine intricacies, the paradoxical complexities, of the Palainian mind.

"'Madam' might be approximately correct," the native's thought went smoothly on. "My name, in your symbology, is Twelfth Pilinipsi; by education, training, and occupation I am a Chief Dexitroboper. I perceive that you are indeed a native of that hellish Planet Three, upon which it was assumed for so long that no life could possibly exist. But communication with your race has been almost impossible heretofore…Ali, the Lens. A remarkable device, truly. I would slay you and take it, except for the obvious fact that only you can possess it."

"What!" Dismay and consternation flooded Samms' mind. "You already know the Lens?"

"No. Yours is the first that any of us has perceived. The mechanics, the mathematics, and the basic philosophy of the thing, however, are quite clear."

"What! Samms exclaimed again. "You can, then, produce Lenses yourselves?"

"By no means, any more than you Tellurians can. There are magnitudes, variables, determinants, and forces involved which no Palainian will ever be able to develop, to generate, or to control."

"I see." The Lensman pulled himself together. For a First Lensman he was making a wretched showing indeed…

"Far from it, sir," the monstrosity assured him. "Considering the strangeness of the environment into which you have voluntarily flung yourself so senselessly, your mind is well integrated and strong. Otherwise it would have shattered. If our positions were reversed, the mere thought of the raging heat of your Earth would come no closer, please!" The thing vanished; reappeared many yards away. Her thoughts were a shudder of loathing, of terror, of sheer detestation. "But to get on: I have been attempting to analyze and to understand your purpose, without success. That failure is not too surprising, of course, since my mind is weak and my total power is small. Explain your mission, please, as simply as you can."

Weak? Small? In view of the power the monstrosity had just shown, Samms probed for irony, for sarcasm or pretense. There was no trace of anything of the kind. He tried, then, for fifteen solid minutes, to explain the Galactic Patrol, but at the end the Palainian's only reaction was one of blank non– comprehension.

"I fail completely to perceive the use of, or the need for, such an organization," she stated flatly. "This altruismwhat good is it? It is unthinkable that any other race would take any risks or exert any effort for us, any more than we would for them. Ignore and be ignored, as you must already know, is the Prime Tenet."

"But there is a little commerce between our worlds; your people did not ignore our psychologists;, and you are not ignoring me," Samms pointed out.

"Oh, none of us is perfect," Pilinipsi replied, with a mental shrug and what seemed to be an airy wave of a multi–tentacled member. "That ideal, like any other, can only be approached asymptotically, never reached; and I, being somewhat foolish and silly, as well as weak and vacillant, am much less perfect than most."

Flabbergasted, Samms tried a new tack. "I might be able to make my position clearer if I knew you better. I know your name, and that you are a woman of Palain Seven"—it is a measure of Virgil Samms' real size that he actually thought "woman", and not merely "female' ="but all I can understand of your occupation is the name you have given it. What does a Chief Dexitroboper do?"

"She—or he or, perhaps, it…is a supervisor of the work of dexitroboping." The thought, while perfectly clear, was completely meaningless to Samms, and the Palainian knew it. She tried again. "Dexitroboping has to do with… nourishment? No—with nutrients."

"Ah. Farming—agriculture," Samms thought; but this time it was the Palainian who could not grasp the concept. "Hunting? Fishing?" No better. "Show me, then, please."

She tried; but demonstration, too, was useless; for to Samms the Palainian's movements were pointless indeed. The peculiarly flowing subtly changing thing darted back and forth, rose and fell, appeared and disappeared; undergoing the while—cyclic changes in shape and form and size, in aspect and texture. It was now spiny, now tentacular, now scaly, now covered with peculiarly repellent feather–like fronds, each oozing a crimson slime. But it apparently did not do anything whatever. The net result of all its activity was, apparently, zero.

"There, it is done." Pilinipsi's thought again came clear. "You observed and understood? You did not. That is strange baffling. Since the Lens did improve communication and understanding tremendously, I hoped that it might extend to the physical as well. But there must be some basic, fundamental difference, the nature of which is at present obscure. I wonder…if I had a Lens, too—but no…"

"But yes!" Samms broke in, eagerly. "Why don't you go to Arisia and be tested for one? You have a magnificent, a really tremendous mind. It is of Lensman grade in every respect except one—you simply don't want to use it!"

"Me? Go to Arisia?" The thought would have been, in a Tellurian, a laugh of scorn, "How utterly silly—how abysmally stupid! There would be personal discomfort, quite possibly personal danger, and two Lenses would be little or no better than one in resolving differences between our two continua, which are probably in fact incommensurable."

"Well, then," Samms thought, almost viciously, "can you introduce me to someone who is stupider, sillier, and more foolish than you are?"

"Not here on Pluto, no." The Palainian took no offense. "That was why it was I who interviewed the earlier Tellurian visitors and why I am now conversing with you. The others avoided you."

"I see." Samms' thought was grim. "How about the home planet, then?"

"Ah. Undoubtedly. In fact, there is a group, a club, of such persons. None of them is, of course, as insane—as aberrant as you are, but they are all much more so than I am."

"Who of this club would be most interested in becoming a Lensman?"

"Tallick was the least stable member of the New–Thought Club when I left. Seven Kragzex a close second. There may of course have been changes since then. But I cannot believe that even Tallick—even Tallick at his outrageous worst—would be crazy enough to join your Patrol."

"Nevertheless, I must see him myself. Can you and will you give me a chart of a routing from here to Palain Seven?"

"I can and I will. Nothing you have thought will be of any use to me; that will be the easiest and quickest way of getting rid of you." The Palainian spread a completely detailed chart in Samms mind, snapped the telepathic line, and went unconcernedly about her incomprehensible business.

Samms, mind reeling, made his way back to his boat and took off. And as the light–years and the parsecs screamed past, he sank deeper and deeper into a welter of unproductive speculation. What were—really—those Palainians? How could they—really—exist as they seemed to exist? And why had some of that dexitroboper's—whatever that meant!thoughts come in so beautifully sharp and clear and plain while others…?

He knew that his Lens would receive and would convert into his own symbology any thought or message, however coded or garbled or however sent or transmitted. The Lens was not at fault; his symbology was There were concepts—things—actualities—occurrences—so foreign to Tellurian experience that no referents existed. Hence the human mind lacked the channels, the mechanisms; to grasp them.

He and Roderick Kinnison had glibly discussed the possibility of encountering forms of intelligent life so alien that humanity would have no point whatever of contact with them. After what Samms had just gone through, that was more of a possibility than either he or his friend had believed; and he hoped grimly, as be considered how seriously this partial contact with the Palainian had upset him, that the possibility would never become a fact.

He found the Palainian system easily enough, and Palain Seven. That planet, of course, was almost as dark upon its sunward side as upon the other, and its inhabitants had no use for light. Pilinipsi's instructions, however, had been minute and exact; hence Samms had very little trouble in locating the principal city—or, rather, the principal village, since there were no real cities. He found the planet's one spaceport. What a thing to call a port! He checked back; recalled exactly this part of his interview with Pluto's Chief Dexitroboper.

"The place upon which space–ships land," had been her thought, when she showed him exactly where it was in relationship to the town. Just that, and nothing else. It had been his mind, not hers, that had supplied the docks and cradles, the service cars, the officers, and all the other things taken for granted in space–fields everywhere as Samms knew them. Either the Palainian had not perceived the trappings with which Samms had invested her visualization, or she had not cared enough about his misapprehension to go to the trouble of correcting it; he did not know which.

The whole area was as bare as his hand. Except for the pitted, scarred, slaggeddown spots which showed so clearly what driving blasts would do to such inconceivably cold rock and metal, Palainport was in no way distinguishable from any other unimproved portion of the planet's utterly bleak surface.

There were no signals; he had been told of no landing conventions. Apparently it was everyone for himself. Wherefore Samms' tremendous landing lights blazed out, and with their aid he came safely to ground.

He put on his armor and strode to the airlock; then changed his mind and went to the cargo–port instead. He had intended to walk, but in view of the rugged and deserted field and the completely unknown terrain between the field and the town, he decided to ride the "creep" instead.

This vehicle, while slow, could go—literally—anywhere. It had a cigar–shaped body of magnalloy; it had big, soft, tough tires; it had cleated tracks; it had air– and water–propellers; it had folding wings; it had driving, braking, and steering jets. It could traverse the deserts of Mars, the oceans and swamps of Venus, the crevassed glaciers of Earth, the jagged, frigid surface of an iron asteroid, and the cratered, fluffy topography of the moon; if not with equal speed, at least with equal safety.

Samms released the thing and drove it into the cargo lock, noting mentally that he would have to exhaust the air of that lock into space before he again broke the inner seal. The ramp slid back into the ship; the cargo port closed. Here he was!

Should he use his headlights, or not? He did not know the Palainians' reaction to or attitude toward light. It had not occurred to him while at Pluto to ask, and it might be important. The landing lights of his vessel might already have done his cause irreparable harm. He could drive by starlight if he had to… but he needed light and he had not seen a single living or moving thing. There was no evidence that there was a Palainian within miles. While he had known, with his brain, that Palain would be dark, he had expected to find buildings and traffic—ground–cars, planes, and at least a few space–ships and not this vast nothingness.

If nothing else, there must be a road from Palain's principal city to its only spaceport; but Samms had not seen it from his vessel and he could not see it now. At least, he could not recognize it. Wherefore he clutched in the tractor drive and took off in a straight line toward town. The going was more than rough it was really rugged but the creep was built to stand up under punishment and its pilot's chair was sprung and cushioned to exactly the same degree. Hence, while the course itself was infinitely worse than the smoothly paved approaches to Rigelston, Samms found this trip much less bruising than the other had been.

Approaching the village, he dimmed his roadlights and slowed down. At its edge he cut them entirely and inched his way forward by starlight alone.

What a town! Virgil Samms had seen the inhabited places of almost every planet of Civilization. He had seen cities laid out in circles, sectors, ellipses, triangles, squares, parallelopipeds practically every plan known to geometry. He had seen structures of all shapes and sizes narrow skyscrapers, vast– spreading one–stories, polyhedra, domes, spheres, semicylinders, and erect and inverted full and truncated cones and pyramids. Whatever the plan or the shapes of the component units, however, those inhabited places had, without exception, been understandable. But this!

Samms, his eyes now completely dark–accustomed, could see fairly well, but the more he saw the less he grasped. There was no plan, no coherence or unity whatever. It was as though a cosmic hand had flung a few hundreds of buildings, of incredibly and senselessly varied shapes and sites and architectures, upon an otherwise empty plain, and as though each structure had been allowed ever since to remain in whatever location and attitude it had chanced to fall. Here and there were jumbled piles of three or more utterly incongruous structures. There were a few whose arrangement was almost orderly. Here and there were large, irregularly–shaped areas of bare, untouched ground. There were no streets at least, nothing that the man could recognize as such.

Samms headed the creep for one of those open areas, then stopped declutched the tracks, set the brakes, and killed the engines.

"Go slow, fellow," he advised himself then. "Until you find out what a dexitroboper actually does while working at his trade, don't take chances of interfering or of doing damage!"

No Lensman knew then that frigid–blooded poison–breathers were not strictly three–dimensional; but Samms did know that he had actually seen things which he could not understand. He and Kinnison had discussed such occurrences calmly enough; but the actuality was enough to shake even the mind of Civilization's First Lensman.

He did not need to be any closer, anyway. He had learned the Palainians' patterns well enough to Lens them from a vastly greater distance than his present one; this personal visit to Palainopolis had been a gesture of friendliness, not a necessity.

"Tallick? Kragzex?" He sent out the questing, querying thought. "Lensman Virgil Samms of Sol Three calling Tallick and Kragzex of Palain Seven."

"Kragzex acknowledging, Virgil Samms," a thought snapped back, as diamond– clear, as precise, as Pilinipsi's had been.

"Is Tallick here, or anywhere on the planet?"

"He is here, but he is emmfozing at the moment. He will join us presently."

Damnation! There it was again! First "dexitroboping", and now this!

"One moment, please," Samms requested. "I fail to grasp the meaning of your thought."

"So I perceive. The fault is of course mine, in not being able to attune my mind fully to yours. Do not take this, please, as any aspersion upon the character or strength of your own mind."

"Of course not. I am the first Tellurian you have met?"

"Yes."

"I have exchanged thoughts with one other Palainian, and the same difficulty existed. I can neither understand nor explain it; but it is as though there are differences between us so fundamental that in some matters mutual comprehension is in fact impossible."

"A masterly summation and undoubtedly a true one. This emmfozing, then if I read correctly, your race has only two sexes?"

"You read correctly."

"I cannot understand. There is no close analogy. However, emmfozing has to do with reproduction."

"I see," and Samms saw, not only a frankness brand–new to his experience, but also a new view of both the powers and the limitations of his Lens.

It was, by its very nature, of precisionist grade. It received thoughts and translated them precisely into English. There was some leeway, but not' much. If any thought was such that there was no extremely close counterpart or referent in English, the Lens would not translate it at all, but would simply give it a hitherto meaningless symbol a symbol which would from that time on be associated, by all Lenses everywhere, with that one concept and no other. Samms realized then that he might, some day, learn what a dexitroboper actually did and what the act of emmfozing actually was; but that he very probably would not.

Tallick joined them then, and Samms again described glowingly, as he had done so many times before, the Galactic Patrol of his imaginings and plannings. Kragzex refused to have anything to do with such a thing, almost as abruptly as Pilinipsi had done, but Tallick lingered and wavered.

"It is widely known that I am not entirely sane," he admitted, "which may explain the fact that I would very much like to have a Lens. But I gather, from what you have said, that I would probably not be given a Lens to use purely for my own selfish purposes?"

"That is my understanding," Samms agreed.

"I was afraid so." Tallick's mien was…"woebegone" is the only word for it. "I have work to do. Projects, you know, of difficulty, of extreme complexity and scope, sometimes even approaching danger. A Lens would be of tremendous use."

"How?" Samms asked. "If your work is of enough importance to enough people, Mentor would certainly give you a Lens."

"His would benefit me; only me. We of Palain, as you probably already know, are selfish, mean–spirited, small–souled, cowardly, furtive, and sly. Of what you call 'bravery' we have no trace. We attain our ends by stealth, by indirection, by trickery and deceit." Ruthlessly the Lens was giving Virgil Samms the uncompromisingly exact English equivalent of the Palainian's every thought. "We operate, when we must operate at all openly, with the absolutely irreducible minimum of personal risk. These attitudes and at= tributes will, I have no doubt, preclude all possibility of Lensmanship for me and for every member of my race."

"Not necessarily."

Not necessarily! Although Virgil Samms did not know it, this was one of the really critical moments in the coming into being of the Galactic Patrol. By a conscious, a tremendous effort, the First Lensman was lifting himself above the narrow, intolerant prejudices of human experience and was consciously attempting to see the whole through Mentor's Arisian mind instead of through his Tellurian own. That Virgil Samms was the first human being to be born with the ability to accomplish that feat even partially was one of the reasons why he was the first wearer of the Lens.

"Not necessarily," First Lensman Virgil Samms said and meant. He was inexpressibly shocked revolted in every human fiber by what this unhuman monster bad so frankly and callously thought. There were, however, many things which no human being ever could understand, and there was not the shadow of a doubt that this Tallick had a really tremendous mind. "You have said that your mind is feeble. If so, there is no simple expression of the weakness of mine. I can perceive only one, the strictly human, facet of the truth. In a broader view it is distinctly possible that your motivation is at least as 'noble' as mine. And to complete my argument, you work with other Palainians, do you not, to reach a common goal?"

"At times, yes."

"Then you can conceive of the desirability of working with non–Palainian entities toward an end which would benefit both races?"

"Postulating such an end, yes; but I am unable to visualize any such. Have you any specific project in mind?"

"Not at the moment." Samms ducked. He had already fired every shot in his locker. "I am quite certain, however, that if you go to Arisia you will be informed of several such projects."

There was a period of silence. Then:

"I believe that I will go to Arisia, at that!" Tallick exclaimed, brightly. "I will make a deal with your friend Mentor. I will give him a share say fifty percent, or forty of the time and effort I save on my own projects!"

"Just so you go, Tallick." Samms concealed right manfully his real opinion of the Palainian's scheme. "When can you go? Right now?"

"By no means. I must first finish this project. A year, perhaps or more; or possibly less. Who knows?"

Tallick cut communications and Samms frowned. He did not know the exact length of Seven's year, but he knew that it was long very long.