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any
better. So maybe I'd better warn you, you poor fool, since you haven't got
sense enough
to see it, that you're playing with an atomic vortex when you push her around
like you've
been doing. Just a very little more of it and she'll get mad, like I did a
second ago except
more so, and you'll wish to Klono you'd never been born. She won't make a sign
until
she blows her top, but I'm telling you she's as much harder and tougher than I
am as
she is older, and what she does to people she gets mad at I wouldn't want to
watch
happen again, even to a snake. She'll pick you up, curl you into a circle,
pull off your
arms, shove your feet down your throat, and roll you across that field there
like a hoop.
After that I don't know what she'll doùdepends on how much pressure she
develops
before she goes off. One thing, though; she's always sorry afterwards. Why,
she even
attends the funerals, sometimes, and insists on paying all the expenses!"
With which outrageous thought she kissed Clarrissa an enthusiastic
goodbye.
"Told you I couldn't stay a minuteù got to do a flitù'see a man about a dog',
you
knowùcame a million parsecs to squeeze you, mums, but it was worth it ùclear
ether!"
She was gone, and it was a dewy-eyed and rapt mother, not a Lensman, who
turned to the still completely disorganized Lyranian. Clarrissa had perceived
nothing
whatever of what had happened; Karen had very carefully seen to that.
"My daughter," Clarrissa mused, as much to herself as to Ladora. "One of
four.
The four dearest, finest, sweetest girls that ever lived. I often wonder how a
woman of
my limitations, of my faults, could possibly have borne such children."
And Ladora of Lyrane, humorless and literal as all Lyranians are, took
those
thoughts at their face value and correlated their every connotation and
implication with
what she herself had perceived in that "dear, sweet" daughter's mind; with
what that
daughter had done and had said. The nature and quality of this hellish
near-person's
"limitations" and "faults" became eminently clear; and as she perceived what
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she
thought was the truth, the Lyranian literally cringed.
"As you know, I have been in doubt as to whether or not to support you
actively,
as you wish," Ladora offered, as the two walked across the field, toward the
line of
ground-cars. "On the one hand, the certainty that the safety, and perhaps the
very
existence, of my race will be at hazard. On the other, the possibility that
you are right in
saying that the situation will continue to deteriorate if we do nothing. The
decision has
not been an easy one to make." Ladora was no longer aloof. She was just plain
scared.
She had been talking against time, and hoping that the help for which she had
long
since called would arrive in time. "I have touched only the outer surface of
your mind.
Will you allow me, without offense, to test its inner quality before deciding
definitely?" In
the instant of asking, Ladora sent out a full-driven probe.
"I will not." Ladora's beam struck a barrier which seemed to her exactly
like
Karen's. None of her race had developed anything like it. She had never seen .
. . yes,
she had, tooù years ago, when she was a child, that time in the assembly
hallùthat
utterly hated male, Kinnison of Tellus! Tellusù Sol III! Clarrissa of Sol III,
then, wasn't a
near-person at all, but a femaleùKinnison's kind of femaleùand a creature who
was
physically a person, but mentally that inconceivable monstrosity, a female,
might be
anything and might do anything! Ladora temporized.
"Excuse me; I did not mean to intrude against your will," she apologized,
smoothly enough. "Since your attitude makes it extremely difficult for me to
cooperate
with you, I can make no promises as yet. What is it that you wish to know
first?"
"I wish to interview your predecessor, the person we called Helen."
Strangely
refreshed, in a sense galvanized by the brief personal visit with her dynamic
daughter, it
was no longer Mrs. Kimball Kinnison who faced the Lyranian queen. Instead, it
was the
Red Lensman; a full-powered Second-Stage Lensman who had finally decided that,
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