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upon her
even more powerful braking jets. Master Pilot Henry Henderson, Prime Base's
best,
was going to kill the awful inertia of the speedster by "balancing her down on
her tail."
Or, to translate from the jargon of space, he was going to hold the tricky,
cranky little
vessel upright upon the terrific blasts of her main driving projectors,
against the Earth's
gravitation and against all other perturbing forces, while her driving force
counteracted,
overcame, and dissipated the full frightful measure of the kinetic energy of
her mass
and speed!
And balance her down he did. Haynes was afraid for a minute that that
intrepid
wight was actually going to land the speedster on her tail. He
didn't-quite-but he had
only a scant hundred feet to spare when he nosed her over and eased her to
ground on
her under-jets.
The crash-wagon and its crew were waiting, and as Kinnison was rushed to
the
hospital the others hurried to the net room. Doctor Lacy first, of course,
then the nurse,
and, to Haynes' approving surprise, she took it like a veteran. Hardly had the
surgeon
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let himself out of the "cocoon" than she was in it, and hardly had the
terrific surges and
recoils of her own not inconsiderable one hundred and forty-five pounds of
mass
abated than she herself was out and sprinting across the sward toward the
hospital.
Haynes went back to his office and tried to work, but he could not
concentrate,
and made his way back to the hospital. There he waited, and as Lacy came out
of the
operating room he buttonholed him.
"How about it, Lacy, will be live?" he demanded.
"Live? Of course he'll live." the surgeon replied, gruffly. "Can't tell
you details yet-
we won't know, ourselves, for a couple of hours yet. Do a flit, Haynes. Come
back at
sixteen forty-not a second before-and I'll tell you all about it."
Since there was no help for it the Port Admiral did go away, but he was
back
promptly on the tick of the designated hour.
"How is he?" he demanded without preamble. "Will he really live, or were
you
just giving me a shot in the arm?"
"Better than that, much better," the surgeon assured him. "Definitely so,
yes.
He's in much better shape than we dared hope. Must have been a very light
crash
indeed û nothing seriously the matter with him at all. We won't even have to
amputate,
from what we can see now. He should make a one hundred percent recovery, not
only
without artificial members, but with scarcely a scar. He couldn't have been in
a space
crack-up at all, or he wouldn't have come out with so little injury."
"Fine, Doc-wonderful! Now the details."
"Here's the picture." The doctor unrolled a full-length X-ray print,
showing every
anatomical detail of the Lensman's interior structure. "First, just notice
that skeleton. It
is really remarkable. Slightly out of true here and there right now, of
course, but I
believe it's going to turn out to be the first absolutely perfect male
skeleton I have ever
seen. That young man will go far, Haynes."
"Sure he will. Why else do you suppose we put him in Gray? But I didn't
come
over here to be told that-show me the damage."
"Look at the picture-see for yourself. Multiple and compound fractures,
you
notice, of legs and arm, and a few ribs. Scapula, of course-there. Oh, yes,
there's a
skull fracture, too, but it doesn't amount to much. That's all-the spine, you
see, isn't
injured at all."
"What d'you mean, 'that's all'? How about his wounds? I saw some of them
myself, and they were not pin-pricks."
"Nothing of the least importance. A few punctured wounds and a couple of
incised ones, but nothing even close to a vital part. He won't need even a
transfusion,
since he stopped the major hemorrhages himself, shortly after he was wounded.
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There
are a few burns, of course, but they are mostly superficial-none that will not
yield quite
readily to treatment."
"Mighty glad of that. He'll be here six weeks, then?"
"Better call it twelve, I think-ten at least. You see, some of the
fractures,
especially those in the left leg, and a couple of burns, are rather severe, as
such things
go. Then, too, the length of time elapsing between injury and treatment didn't
do
anything a bit of good."
"In two weeks hell be wanting to get up and go places and do things, and
in six
hell be tearing down your hospital, stone by stone."
"Yes." The surgeon smiled. "He isn't the type to make an ideal patient,
but, as I
have told you before, I like to have patients that we do not like."
"And another thing. I want the files on his nurses, particularly the
red-headed
one."
"I suspected that you would, so I had them sent down. Here you are. Glad
you
noticed MacDougall-she's by way of being my favorite. Clarrissa
MacDougall-Scotch, of
course, with that name-twenty years old. Height, five feet six, weight, one
forty-five and
a half. Here are her pictures, conventional and X-ray. Man, look at that
skeleton!
Beautiful! The only really perfect skeleton I ever saw in a woman."
"It isn't the skeleton Im interested in," grunted Haynes. "It's what is
outside the
skeleton that my Lensman will be looking at.'
"You needn't worry about MacDougall,," declared the surgeon. -"One good
look
at that picture will tell you that. She classifies-with that skeleton she has
to. She couldn't
leave the beam a millimeter, even if she wanted to. Good, bad, or indifferent,
male or
female, physical, mental, moral, and psychological, the skeleton tells the
-whole story."
"Maybe it does to you, but not to me," and Haynes took up the
"conventional"
photograph a stereoscope in full, true color, an almost living duplicate of
the girl in
question. Her thick, heavy hair was not red, but was a vividly intense and
brilliant
auburn, a coppery bronze, flashed with red and gold. Her eyes . . . . . bronze
was all
that he could think of, with flecks of topaz and of tawny gold. Her skin, too,
was faintly
bronze, glowing with even more than healthy youth's normal measure of
sparkling
vitality. Not only was she beautiful, the Port Admiral decided, in the words
of the
surgeon, she "classified."
"Hm . . . . m. Dimples, too," Haynes muttered. "Worse even than I
thought-she's
a menace to civilization," and he went on to read the documents. "Family . . .
. . hm.
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History . . . . experiences . . . reactions and characteristics . . . .
behavior patterns . . . .
psychology . . . . mentality . . . ." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]