Gray Lensman by E. E. Smith Read Free Book Online

off for the rest of the evening." She sighed in relief as he snapped the telepathic line as though he were hanging up the receiver of a telephone.
    "I'd like to dance with you all, kids," he addressed at large the group of buds surrounding him and eyeing him hungrily, "but I've got this next one. See you later, perhaps," and he was gone.
    "Sorry, fellows," he remarked casually, as he made his way through the circle of men around the gorgeous red-head. "Sorry, but this dance is mine, isn't it, Miss MacDougall?"
    She nodded, flashing the radiant smile which had so aroused his ire during his hospitalization. "I heard you invoke your spaceman's god, but I was beginning to be afraid that you had forgotten this dance."
    "And she said she wasn't dating ahead—the diplomat!" murmured an ambassador, aside.
    "Don't be a dope," a captain of Marines muttered in reply. "She meant with us—that's a Gray Lensman!"
    Although the nurse, as has been said, was anything but small, she appeared almost petite against the Lensman's mighty frame as they took off. Silently the two circled the great hall once; lustrous, goldenly green gown—of Earthly silk, this one, and less revealing than most—swishing in perfect cadence against deftly and softly stepping high-zippered gray boots.
    "This is better, Mac," Kinnison sighed, finally, "but I lack just seven thousand kilocycles of being in tune with this. Don't know what's the matter, but it's clogging my jets. I must be getting to be a space-louse."
    "A space-louse—you? Uh-uh!" She shook her head. "You know very well what the matter is—you're just too much of a man to mention it."
    "Huh?" he demanded.
    "Uh-huh," she asserted, positively if obliquely. "Of course you're not in tune with this crowd—how could you be? I don't fit into it any more myself, and what I'm doing isn't even a baffled flare compared to your job. Not one in ten of these fluffs here tonight has ever been beyond the stratosphere; not one in a hundred has ever been out as far as Jupiter, or has ever had a serious thought in her head except about clothes or men; not one of them all has any more idea of what a Lensman really is than I have of hyper-space or of non-Euclidean geometry!"
    "Kitty, kitty!" he laughed. "Sheathe the little claws, before you scratch somebody!"
    "That isn't cattishness, it's the barefaced truth. Or perhaps," she amended, honestly, "it's both true and cattish, but it's certainly true. And that isn't half of it. No one in the Universe except yourself really knows what you are doing, and I'm pretty sure that only two others even suspect. And Doctor Lacy is not one of them," she concluded, surprisingly.
    Though shocked, Kinnison did not miss a step. "You don't fit into this matrix, any more than I do," he agreed, quietly. "S'pose you and I could do a little flit somewhere?"
    "Surely, Kim," and, breaking out of the crowd, they strolled out into the grounds. Not a word was said until they were seated upon a broad, low bench beneath the spreading foliage of a tree.
    Then: "What did you come here for tonight, Mac—the real reason?" he demanded, abruptly.
    "I. . . we . . . you . . . I mean—oh, skip it!" the girl stammered, a wave of scarlet flooding her face and down even to her superb, bare shoulders. Then she steadied herself and went on:
    "You see, I agree with you—as you say, I check you to nineteen decimals. Even Doctor Lacy, with all his knowledge, can be slightly screwy at times, I think."
    "Oh, so that's it!" It was not, it was only a very minor part of her reason; but the nurse would have bitten her tongue off rather than admit that she had come to that dance solely and only because Kimball Kinnison was to be there. "You knew, then, that this was old Lacy's idea?"
    "Of course. You would never have come, else. He thinks that you may begin wobbling on the beam pretty soon unless you put out a few braking jots."
    "And you?"
    "Not in a million, Kim. Lacy's as cockeyed as Trenco's ether, and I as good as