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 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 yetwe 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—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. 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. History…experiences…reactions and characteristics…behavior patterns… psychology…mentality…"
"She'll do, Lacy," he advised the surgeon finally. "Keep her on with him…"
"Do!" Lacy snorted. "It isn't a question of whether she rates. Look at that hairthose eyes. Pure Samms. A man to match her would have to be one in a hundred thousand million. With that skeleton, though, he is."
"Of course he is. You don't seem to realize, you myopic old appendix– snatcher, that he's pure Kinnison!"
"Ah…so maybe we could…but he won't be falling for anybody yet, since he's just been unattached. He'll be bullet–proof for quite a while. You ought to know that young, Lensmen—especially young Gray Lensmen—can't see anything but their jobs, for a couple of years, anyway."
"His skeleton tells you that, too, huh?" Haynes grunted, skeptically. "Ordinarily, yes, but you never can tell, especially in hospitals…
"More of your layman's misinformation!" Lacy snapped. "Contrary to popular belief, romance does not thrive in hospitals, except, of course, among the staff. Patients oftentimes think that they fall in love with nurses, but it takes two people to make one romance. Nurses do not fall in love with patients, because a man is never at his best under hospitalization. In fact, the better a man is, the poorer a showing he is apt to make."
"And, as I forget who said, a long time ago, 'no generalization is true, not even this one'," retorted the Port Admiral. "When it does hit him it will hit hard, and we'll take no chances. How about the black–haired one?"
"Well, I just told you that MacDougall has the only perfect skeleton I ever saw in a woman. Brownies is very good, too, of course, but…"
"But not good enough to rate Lensman's Mate, eh?" Haynes completed the thought. "Then take her out. Pick the best skeletons you've got for this job, and see that no others come anywhere near him. Transfer them to some other hospital—to some other floor of this one, at least. Any woman that he ever falls for will fall for him, in spite of your ideas as to the one–wayness of hospital romance, and I don't want him to have such a good chance of making a dive at something that doesn't rate up. Am I right or wrong, and for how much?"