Gray Lensman

22: Regeneration

"Hi, skeleton–gazer!"

"Ho, Big Chief Feet–on–the–Desk!"

"I see your red–headed sector chief is still occupying all strategic salients in force." Haynes had paused in the Surgeon–Marshal's –office on his way to another of his conferences with the Gray Lensman. "Can't you get rid of her or don't you want to?"

"Don't want to. Couldn't, anyway, probably. The young vixen would tear down the hospital—she might even resign, marry him out of hand, and lug him off somewhere. You want him to recover, don't you?"

"Don't be any more of an idiot than you have to. What a question!"

"Don't work up a temperature about MacDougall, then. As long as she's around him—and that's twenty four hours a day—hell get everything in the universe that he can get any good out of."

"That's so, too. This other thing's out of our hands now, anyway. Kinnison can't hold his position long against her and himself both— overwhelmingly superior force. Just as well, too—Civilization needs more like those two."

"Check, but the affair isn't out of our hands, by any means—we've got quite a little fine work to do there yet, as you'll see, before it'll be a really good job. But about Kinnison…"

"Yes. When are you going to fit arms and legs on him? He should be practising with them at this stage of the game, I should think—I was."

"You should think—but unfortunately, you don't," was the surgeon's dry rejoinder. "If you did, you would have paid more attention to what Phillips has been doing. He's making the final test today. Come along and we'll explain it to you again—your conference with Kinnison can wait half an hour."

In the research laboratory which had been assigned to Phillips they found von Hohendorff with the Posenian. Haynes was surprised to see the old Commandant of Cadets, but Lacy quite evidently had known that he was to be there. "Phillips," the Surgeon–Marshal began, "explain to this warhorse, in words of as few syllables as possible, what you are doing."

"The original problem was to discover what hormone or other agent caused proliferation of neural tissue…"

"Wait a minute, I'd better do it," Lacy broke in. "Besides, you wouldn't do yourself justice. The first thing he found out was that the problem of repairing damaged nervous tissue was inextricably involved with several other unknown things, such as the original growth of such tissue, its relationship to growth in general, the regeneration of lost members in lower forms, and so on. You see, Haynes, it's a known fact that nerves do grow, or else they could not exist; and in lower forms of life they regenerate. Those facts were all he had, at first. In higher forms, even during the growth stage, regeneration does not occur spontaneously. Phillips set out to find out why.

"The thyroid controls growth, but does not initiate it, he learned. This fact seemed to indicate that there was an unknown hormone involved—that certain lower types possess an endocrine gland which is either atrophied or non– existent in higher types. If the latter, it was no landing. He reasoned, however, since higher types evolved from lower, that the gland in question might very well exist in a vestigial state. He studied animals, 'thousands of them, from the germ upward. He exhausted the patience of the Posenian authorities; and when they cut off his appropriation, on the ground that the thing was impossible, he came here. We felt that if he were so convinced of the importance of the work as to be willing to spend bis whole life on it, the least we could do would be to support him. We gave him carte blanche.

"The man is a miracle of perseverance, a keen observer, a shrewd reasoner, and a mechanic par excellence—a born researcher. So he finally found out what it must be—the pineal. Then he had to find the stimulant. Drugs, chemicals, the spectrum of radiation; singly and in combination. Years of plugging, with just enough progress to keep him at it. Visits to other planets peopled by races human to two places or more; learning everything that had been done along that line. When you fellows moved Medon over here he visited it as routine, and there he hit the jackpot. Wise himself is a surgeon, and the Medonians have had warfare and grief enough to develop the medical and surgical arts no end.

"They knew how to stimulate the pineal, but their method was dangerous. With Phillips' fresh viewpoint, his wide–knowledge, and his mechanical genius, they worked out a new and highly satisfactory technique. He was going to try it out on a pirate slated for the lethal chamber, but von Hohendorff heard about it and insisted on being the guinea pig. Got up on his Unattached Lensman's high horse and won't come down. So here we are."

"Hm…m…interesting!" The admiral had listened attentively. "You're pretty sure it'll work, then, I gather?"

"As sure as we can be of any technique so new. Ninety percent probability, say—perhaps ninety five."

"Good enough odds." Haynes turned to von Hohendorff. "What do you mean, you old reprobate, by sneaking around behind my back and horning in on my reservation? I rate Unattached too, you know, and it's mine. You're out, Von."

"I saw it first and I refuse to relinquish." Von Hohendorff was adamant.

"You've got to," Haynes insisted. "He isn't your cub any more, he's my Lensman. Besides, I'm a better test than you are—I've got more parts to replace than you have."

"Four or five make just as good a test as a dozen," the commandant declared.

"Gentlemen, think!" the Posenian pleaded.

"Please consider that the pineal is actually inside the brain. It is true that I have not been able to discover any brain injury so far, but the process has not yet been applied to a Tellurian brain and I can offer no assurance whatever that some obscure injury will not result."

"What of it?" and the two old Unattached Lensmen resumed their battle, hammer and tongs. Neither would yield a millimeter.

"Operate on them both, then, since they're both above law or reason," Lacy finally ordered in exasperation. "There ought to be a law to reduce Gray Lensmen to the ranks when they begin to suffer from ossification of the intellect"

"Starting with yourself, perhaps?" the admiral shot back, not at all abashed. Haynes relented enough to let von Hohendorff go first, and both were given the necessary injections. The commandant was then strapped solidly into a chair; his head was immobilized with clamps.

The Posenian swung his needle–rays into place; two of them, each held rigidly upon micrometered racks and each operated by two huge, double, rock– steady hands. The operator looked entirely aloof—being eyeless and practically headless, it is impossible to tell from a Posenian's attitude or posture anything about the focal point of his attention—but the watchers knew that he was observing in microscopic detail the tiny gland within the old Lensman's skull.

Then Haynes. "Is this all there is to it, or do we come back for more?" he asked, when he was released from his shackles.

"That's all," Lacy answered. "One stimulation lasts for life, as far as we know. But if the treatment was successful you'll come back—about day after tomorrow, I think—to go to bed here. Your spare equipment won't fit and your stumps may require surgical attention."

Sure enough, Haynes did come back to the hospital, but not to go to bed. He was too busy. Instead, he got a wheel–chair and in it he was taken back to his now boiling office. And in a few more days he called Lacy in high exasperation.

"Know what you've done?" he demanded. "Not satisfied with taking my perfectly good parts away from me, you took my teeth too! They don't fit—I can't eat a thing! And I'm hungry as a wolf—I don't think I was ever so hungry in my life! I can't live on soup, man; I've got work to do. What are you going to do about it?"

"Ho–ho–haw!" Lacy roared. "Serves you right—von Hohendorff is taking it easy here, sitting on top of the world. Easy, now, sailor, don't rupture your aorta. Ill send a nurse over with a soft–boiled egg and a spoon. Teething—at your age—Haw–ho–haw!"

But it was no ordinary nurse who came, a few minutes later, to see the Port Admiral; it was the sector chief herself. She looked at him pityingly as she trundled him into his private office and shut the door, thereby establishing complete coverage.

"I had no idea, Admiral Haynes, that you…that there…" she paused.

"That I was so much of a rebuild?" complacently. "Except in the matter of eyes—which he doesn't need anyway—our mutual friend Kinnison has very little on me, my dear. I got so handy with the replacements that very few people knew how much of me was artificial. But it's these teeth that are taking all the joy out of life. I'm hungry, confound it! Have you got anything really satisfying that I can eat?"

"I'll say I have!" She fed him; then, bending over, she squeezed him tight and kissed him emphatically. "You and the commandant are just perfectly wonderful old darlings, and I love you!" she declared. "Lacy was simply poisonous to laugh at you the way he did. Why, you're two of the world's very best! And he knew perfectly well all the time, the lug, that of course you'd be hungry; ,that you'd have to eat twice as much as usual while your legs and things are growing. Don't worry, admiral, I'll feed you until you bulge. I want you to hurry up with this, so they'll do it to Kim."

"Thanks, Mac," and as she wheeled him back into the main office he considered her anew. A ravishing creature, but sound. Rash, and a bit stubborn, perhaps; impetuous and headstrong; but clean, solid metal all the way through. She had what it takes—she qualified. She and Kinnison would make a mighty fine couple when the lad got some of that heroic damn nonsense knocked out of his head… but there was work to do.

There was. The Galactic Council had considered thoroughly Kinnison's reports; its every member had conferred with him and with Worsel at length. Throughout the First Galaxy the Patrol was at work in all its prodigious might, preparing to wipe out the menace to Civilization which was Boskone. First–line super– dreadnoughts—no others would go upon that mission—were being built and armed, rebuilt and re–armed.

Well it was that the Galactic Patrol had previously amassed an almost inexhaustible supply of wealth, for its "reserves of expendable credit" were running like water.

Weapons, supposedly already of irresistible power, were made even more powerful. Screens already "impenetrable" were stiffened into even greater stubbornness. Primary projectors were made to take even higher loads for longer times. New and heavier Q–type helices were designed and built. Larger and more destructive duodec bombs were hurled against already ruined, torn, and quivering test–planets. Uninhabited worlds were being equipped with super– Bergenholms and with driving projectors. The negasphere, the most incredible menace to navigation which had ever existed in space, was being patrolled by a cordon of guard–ships.

And all this activity centered in one vast building and culminated in one man—Port Admiral Haynes, Galactic Councillor. And Haynes could not get enough to eat because he was cutting a new set of teeth!

He cut them, all thirty two of them. Arm and leg, foot and hand grew perfectly, even to the nails. Hair grew upon what had for years been a shining expanse of pate. But, much to Lacy's relief, it was old skin, not young, that covered the new limbs. It was white hair, not brown, that was dulling the glossiness of Haynes' bald old head. His trifocals, unchanged, were still necessary if he were to see anything clearly, near or far.

"Our experimental animals aged and died normally," he explained graciously, "but I was beginning to wonder if we had rejuvenated you two, or perhaps endowed you with eternal life. Glad to see that the new parts have the same physical age as the rest of you—It would be mildly embarrassing to have to kill two Gray Lensmen to get rid of them."

"You're about as funny as a rubber crutch," Haynes grunted. "When are you going to give Kinnison the works? Don't you realize we need him?"

"Pretty quick now. Just as soon as we give you and Von your psychological examinations."

"Bah! That isn't necessary—my brain's QX!"

"That's what you think, but what do you know about brains? Worse! will tell us what shape your mind—if any—Is in."

The Velantian put both Haynes and von Hohendorff through a gruelling examination, finding that their minds had not been affected in any way by the stimulants applied to their pineal glands.

Then and only then did Phillips operate upon Kinnison; and in his case, too, the operation was a complete success. Arms and legs and eyes replaced themselves flawlessly. The scars of his terrible wounds disappeared, leaving no sign of ever having been.

He was a little slower, however, somewhat clumsy, and woefully weak. Therefore, instead of discharging him from the hospital as cured, which procedure would have restored to him automatically all the rights and privileges of an Unattached Lensman, the Council decided to transfer him to a physical–culture camp. A few weeks there would restore to him entirely the strength, speed, and agility which had formerly been his, and he would then be allowed to resume active duty.

Just before he left the hospital, Kinnison strolled with Clarrissa out to a bench in the grounds.

"…and you're making a perfect recovery," the girl was saying. "You'll be exactly as you were. But things between us aren't just as they were, and they never can be again. You know that, Kim. We've got unfinished business to transact—let's take it down off the shelf before you go."

"Better let it lay, Mac." All the new–found joy of existence went out of the man's eyes. "I'm whole, yes, but that angle was really the least important of all. You never yet have faced squarely the fact that my job isn't done and that my chance of living through it is just about one in ten. Even Phillips can't do anything about a corpse."

"I won't face it, either, unless and until I must." Her reply was tranquility itself. "Most of the troubles people worry about in advance never do materialize. And even if it did, you ought to know that I…that any woman would rather…well, that half a loaf is better than no bread."

"QX. I haven't mentioned the worst thing. I didn't want to—but if you've got to have it, here it is," the man wrenched out. "Look at what I am. A bar–room brawler. A rum–dum. A hardboiled egg. A cold–blooded, ruthless murderer; even of my own men…"

"Not that, Kirn, ever, and you know it," she rebuked him.

"What else can you call it?" he grated. "A killer besides—a red– handed butcher if there ever was one; then, now, and forever. I've got to be. I can't get away from it. Do you think that you, or any other decent woman, could stand it to live with me? That you could feel my arms around you, feel my gory paws touching you, without going sick at the stomach?"

"Oh, so that's what's been really griping you all this time?" Clarrissa was surprised, but entirely unshaken. "I don't have to think about that, Kim—I know. If you were a murderer or had the killer instinct, that would be different, but you aren't and you haven't. You are hard, of course. You have to be…but do you think I'd be running a temperature over a softy? You brawl, yes—like the world's champion you are. Anybody you ever killed needed killing, there's no question of that. You don't do these things for fun; and the fact that you can drive yourself to do the things that have to be done shows your real size.

"Nor have you even thought of the obverse; that you lean over backwards in wielding that terrific power of yours. The Desplaines woman, the countess— lots of other instances. I respect and honor you more than any other man I have ever known. Any woman who really knew you would —she must!

"Listen, Kim. Read my mind, all of it. You'll really know me then, and understand me better than I can ever explain myself."

"Have you got a picture of me doing that?" he asked, flatly.

"No, you big, unreasonable clunker, I haven't!" she flared, "and that's just what's driving me mad!"

Then, voice dropping to a whisper, almost sobbing;

"Cancel that, Kim—I didn't mean it. You wouldn't—you couldn't, I suppose, and still be you, the man I love. But isn't there something—anything—that will make you understand what I really am?"

"I know what you are." Kinnison's voice was uninflected, weary.

"As I told you before—the universe's best It's what I am that's clogging the jets— what I have been and what I've got to keep on being. I simply don't rate up, and you'd better lay off me, Mac, while you can. There's a poem by one of the ancients—Kipling—the 'Ballad of Boh Da Thone'—that describes it exactly. You wouldn't know it…"

"You just think I wouldn't," nodding brightly. "The only trouble is, you always think of the wrong verses. Part of it really is descriptive of you. You know, where all the soldiers of the Black Tyrone thought so much of their captain?"

She recited: "'And worshipped with fluency, fervor, and zeal " The mud on the boot–heels of "Crook" O'Neil.' "That describes you to a 'T.'"

"You're crazy for the lack of sense," he demurred. "I don't rate like that."

"Sure you do," she assured him. "All the men think of you that way. And not only men.

Women, too, darn 'em—and the next time I catch one of them at it I'm going to kick her cursed teeth out, one by one!" Kinnison laughed, albeit a trifle sourly. "You're raving, Mac. Imagining things. But to get back to that poem, what I was referring to went like this…"

"I know how it goes. Listen:

But the captain had quitted the long–drawn strife

And in far Simoorie had taken a wife;

And she was a damsel of delicate mold,

With hair like the sunshine and heart of gold.

And little she knew the arms that embraced

Had cloven a man from the brow to the waist:

And little she knew that the loving lips

Had ordered a quivering life's eclipse,

And the eyes that lit at her lightest breath

Had glared unawed in the Gates of Death.

(For these be matters a man would hide,

As a general thing, from an innocent bride.)

"That's what you mean, isn't it?" she asked, quietly.

"Mac, you know a lot of things you've got no business knowing." Instead of answering her question, he stared at her speculatively. "My sprees and brawls, Dessa Desplaines and the Countess Avondrin, and now this. Would you mind telling me how you get the stuff?"

"I'm closer to you than you suspect, Kirn—I've always been. Worsel calls it being 'en rapport.' You don't need to think at me—in fact, you have to put up a conscious block to keep me out. So I know a lot that I shouldn't, but Lensmen aren't the only ones who don't talk. You'd been thinking about that poem a lot—it worried you—so I checked with Archeology on it. I memorized most of it."

"Well, to get the true picture of me you'll have to multiply that by a thousand. Also, don't forget that loose heads might be rolling, out onto your breakfast table almost any morning instead of only once."

"So what?" she countered evenly. "Do you think I could sit for Kipling's portrait of Mrs. O'Neil? Nobody ever called my mold delicate, and Kipling, if he had been describing me, would have said:

With hair like a conflagration,

'And a heart of solid brass!'

"Captain O'Neil's bride, as well as being innocent and ignorant, strikes me as having been a good deal of a sissy, something of a weeping willow, and no little of a shrinking violet Tell me, Kirn, do you think she would have made good as a sector chief nurse?"

"No, but that's neither…"

"It is, too," she interrupted. "You've got to consider that I did, and that it's no job for any girl with a weak stomach. Besides, the Boh's head took the fabled Mrs. O'Neil by surprise. She didn't know that her husband used to be in the wholesale mayhem–and–killing business. I do.

"And lastly, you big lug, do you think I'd be making such bare–faced passes at you unless I knew exactly what the score is—exactly where you stand? You're too much of a gentleman to read my mind; but I'm not that sque…I had to know."

"Huh?" he demanded, blushing fiercely. "You really know, then, that…" he would not say it, even then.

"Of course I know!" She nodded; then, as the man spread his hands helplessly, she abandoned her attempt to keep the conversation upon a light level.

"I know, my dear. There's nothing we can do about ft yet." Her voice was unsteady, her heart in every word. "You have to do your job, and I honor you for that, even if it does take you away from me. It'll be easier for you, though, I think, and I know it will be easier for me, to have it out in the open. Whenever you're ready, Kim, I'll be here—or somewhere—waiting. Clear ether, Gray Lensman!" and, rising to her feet, she turned back toward the hospital.

"Clear ether, Chris!" Unconsciously he used the pet name by which he had thought of her so long. He stared after her for a minute, hungrily. Then, squaring his shoulders, he strode away.

And upon far Jarnevon Eichmil, the First of Boskone, was conferring with Jalte via communicator. Long since, the Kalonian had delivered through devious channels the message of Boskone to an imaginary director of Lensmen; long since had he received this cryptically direful reply:

"Morgan lives, and so does—Star A Star."

Jalte had not been able to report to his chief any news concerning the fate of that which the speedster bore, since spies no longer existed within the reservations of the Patrol. He had learned of no discovery that any Lensman had made. He could not venture a hypothesis as to how this Star A Star had heard of Jarnevon or had learned of its location. He was sure of only one thing, and that was a grimly disturbing fact indeed. The Patrol was re–arming throughout the galaxy, upon a scale theretofore unknown. Eichmil's thought was cold:

"That means but one thing. A Lensman invaded you and learned of us here— in no other way could knowledge of Jarnevon have come to them."

"Why me?" Jalte demanded. "If there exists a mind of power sufficient to break my screens and tracelessly to invade my mind, what of yours?"

"It is proven by the outcome." The Boskonian's statement was a calm summation of fact. "The messenger sent against you succeeded; the one against us failed. The Patrol intends and is preparing: certainly to wipe out our remaining forces within the Tellurian Galaxy; probably to attack your stronghold; eventually to invade our own galaxy."

"Let them come!" snarled the Kalonian. "We can and will hold this planet forever against anything they can bring through space!"

"I would not be too sure of that," cautioned the superior. "In fact, if— as I am beginning to regard as a probability—the Patrol does make a concerted drive against any significant number of our planetary organizations, you should abandon your base there and return to Kalonia, after disbanding and so preserving for future use as many as possible of the planetary units."

"Future use? In that case there will be no future."

"There will so," Eichmil replied, coldly vicious. "We are strengthening the defenses of Jarnevon to withstand any conceivable assault. If they do not attack us here of their own free will we shall compel them to do so. Then, after destroying their every mobile force, we shall again take over their galaxy. Anns for the purpose are even now in the building. Is the matter clear?"

"It is clear. We shall warn all our groups that such an order may issue, and we shall prepare to abandon this base should such a step become desirable."

So it was planned; neither Eichmil nor Jalte even suspecting two startling truths:

First, that when the Patrol was ready it would strike hard and without warning, and

Second, that it would strike, not low, but high!